Landfill worker saves tortured dog

It could have eas­ily been a hor­ri­ble tragedy, but instead there was a happy end­ing as a dog, sep­a­rated from its Welling­ton fam­ily, was finally reunited with its own­ers after a har­row­ing ordeal.

“What a happy end­ing this one had, but it was quite tragic at the time the story broke,” said Lorie Wilber, from Part­ners With Paws.

Last Thurs­day, at the Repub­lic Ser­vices land­fill, a worker on a bull­dozer saw move­ment in a pile of trash he was prepar­ing to move with the machin­ery. The oper­a­tor called one of his cowork­ers, Dion Granger, and told him that he thought there was a dog in the trash.

“He called me to see if I could get it out of there because I’m the ani­mal guy around here. I walked up the side of the hill, and here’s this lit­tle wiener dog run­ning down, and he looked like he had a vest and a leash on,” Granger said. “When I got close to him, I real­ized it wasn’t; some­one had wrapped him in tape. It looked like they wrapped him like he was a mummy.”

Once the dachs­hund saw Granger, he tried to walk over to him. Granger said the dog was cov­ered in red from a cut on his ear as well as some paint that may have been thrown away in the same dump­ster as the dog.

“I went up and caught him and brought him down to the shop. We cut the tape off of him. We tried to be easy, but you know how that works,” Granger said. “The lit­tle guy was a real trooper. For as bad of shape as he was in, he did really good with us.”

The work­ers imme­di­ately called the Ober­lin Ani­mal Hos­pi­tal, who in turn called Vera Opel, from the Oasis ani­mal shelter.

“While wait­ing for Vera to pick up the dog, the guys worked gen­tly to remove the tape,” Wilber said. “There were actual stripe marks on his fur and a lot of ‘glue’ residue from the tape.”

The dog was taken to the vet­eri­nar­ian clinic where work was done on him imme­di­ately. The dog suf­fered from an ear injury, as well as a toe injury, from the ordeal.

Oasis paid the $400 bill for the treat­ment, for which Wilber said she is seek­ing dona­tions to help cover the cost. So far, $150 has been donated to help defray the cost.

“When the story broke that the dog was found, I did a mass appeal on my Canine/Feline Grapevine, (an e-mail cross post group) and my Part­ners With Paws of Lorain County Face­book page,” Wilber said.

The fol­low­ing day, after work, Granger stopped at the vet clinic to see how the dog was doing.

“I went up and checked on him the fol­low­ing night after they did surgery on him,” Granger said. “Actu­ally, I con­sid­ered adopt­ing him.”

The news prompted a story from an area news­pa­per, which ran a photo of the dog with the story.

Mean­while, in Welling­ton, a fam­ily was search­ing for their dog, who had gone miss­ing Thurs­day morn­ing, a dachs­hund named Charlie.

“We’re not really sure what hap­pened. I let him out to go to the bath­room. When I came out to get him, he wasn’t even in the yard,” the owner’s dog said. “The gates were closed, but he was just gone.”

She and her hus­band spent the next two days dri­ving around town, going door to door, and talk­ing with friends and neigh­bors to see if any­one had seen Char­lie. On Sat­ur­day, a friend called them and said that Char­lie was in the newspaper.

“When I looked in the paper, it was unbe­liev­able. Imme­di­ately, I called Ober­lin Ani­mal Hos­pi­tal, which is actu­ally our vet,” the man said.

He drove to Ober­lin to iden­tify Charlie.

“Vera was present, when the owner came to ID the dog, she knew it was their dog, as Char­lie imme­di­ately reacted to his name and went crazy on the owner giv­ing him kisses and wag­ging his tail like crazy,” Wilber said.

“I lost it,” the owner said. “I just broke down and went to my knees.”

Accord­ing to the cou­ple, the Welling­ton Police Depart­ment is con­duct­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion to try to deter­mine who took Char­lie, wrapped him in tape, and threw him in a dumpster.

Char­lie is now back home, and recov­er­ing from his injuries. The fam­ily said he’s set­tled back into his nor­mal rou­tine, for the most part.

“He doesn’t go out­side now, unless one of us are with him. Even at night, if he has to go to the bath­room before he goes to bed, we’re with him,” the woman said.

Granger said the story luck­ily has a happy end­ing, and can’t believe it didn’t end tragically.

“There’s 400 trucks a day that dump at the land­fill, and for him to come out of one of those trucks, with four to eight machines in that trash at any given time, is amaz­ing. I can’t believe they saw him,” he said.

The Welling­ton cou­ple said they want to thank Granger for sav­ing their fam­ily friend, and they, along with Wilber, say he is a hero.

Editor’s note: The fam­ily who owns Char­lie has asked us not to iden­tify them for fear of retal­i­a­tion from the per­pe­tra­tors of this crime. We agreed; any­one who would do this to an ani­mal should be con­sid­ered dangerous.

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Aug 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.