Bailey
My children and I had just lost our rescue Westie, Emma, to a brain tumor when we got a call from Williamson County Animal Control in Tennessee. I had done some newsaper stories on Animal Control and knew the assistant director, Debbie Leddy. Debbie said, "Peggy, get up here quick! We've got a Westie puppy!" I flew up the road and there he was, a little three-month-old boy, scared and shaking in the clean but scary facility. A family had brought him in on Friday and it was now Monday. (Had Debbie been there on Friday she would have called me immediately because she knew about the heartbreak of our family losing Emma.)
Debbie let me take the puppy home and he was so scared that he "had an accident" in his kennel cage on the way home. Little did I know that his experience with kennel cages had been horrific. I had him in the bathtub, getting him cleaned up, when my two kids got home from school. They were thrilled, got out the Scottish tartans book, and named him "Bailey," after the Bailey clan. I told them, though, that the owner had 10 days to claim the dog and that we mustn't get too attached.
I was so afraid that some little child had lost this precious Westie that I drove around the neighborhood where he had been found, searching for the owner. There were no signs about a lost dog. No neighbors knew anything. No vets had been called. And in 10 days, Bailey was ours.
A year later, I got a call from Debbie Leddy. I wasn't surprised since I was a newspaper reporter and a big story had just broken about a woman running a huge puppymill in Williamson County. Her treatment of the dogs she was breeding (including a few Westies) was so horrible that she was later convicted and jailed. The dogs had to be moved into an empty school building, and volunteers organized to help care for them. I thought that's what Debbie was calling me about. Instead, she said, "Have you figured out where Bailey came from yet?"
She was right. The puppymill breeder lived right across the street from where Bailey had been found, shaking on someone's back deck one morning. He had escaped! And the "owner" never reported him missing because she was afraid that someone would find out about the puppymill she was operating in a rural area of Williamson County.
I got to meet the dog that was mostly likely Bailey's mother. She was in terrible shape, with mange and other problems. Two more puppies had been crammed into the small cage with her. It's doubtful that the dogs got out of their cages regularly, and Bailey remains afraid of cages to this day.
All of the dogs from that episode, the dogs that were able to be saved, were eventually placed in good homes. But we had gotten our boy the year before. And we could not love him more.
Peggy Shaw
Decatur, GA
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