Rest in peace, Lora. It was a rough morning.Lora got up early Saturday, the second day after her nails were clipped under sedation. She was hung over on Friday and shook it off when she got up. She smelled the T-bone steak Gail couldn't eat when we came home Friday night.
When I took it out of the fridge for treats and tricks, she ran to Gail's apartment as if to say "Thank you." She was beaming!
She did a couple sit pretties, shake and chokala. Then she ran out to "make pee pee." She wasn't gone but a few minutes, just out the door to the median strip, and across the street in the La Gloria neighborhood of Isla Mujeres to visit Baut.
Baut didn't move to play and she ran home. But as soon as she got in the door, she was thrown to the side, then began to tremble. I knew. I am an islander.
I put her on her doggie bed, hugged her and grabbed the cell phone. When Delfino got the call, he knew. He had tended to another strychnine patient at 3am. There would be more.
He came quickly, living just down the hill. He gave her a shot of valium to calm the shakes and spasms. I knew he could not save her. Stychnine is hard to reverse.
He tried. She got other drugs including morphine. If the spasms can be stopped, the system can be purged, hydrated and chelated - sometimes resulting in a saved life. But Delifino saw all he could do was euthanize her with an overdose.
While I waited, Federico came over, said he was sorry, and began to clean his steps where the poison laid. He has a Chihuahua who parents both died in the poisoning of 2007, when it was one day old. Grandchildren up and down the steps all day long. He was sullen.
Delfino didn't call right away. But then he did, informing me of the outcome and beginning to talk arrangements. She was cremated in Cancun with other pets. To have her done separate would cost much more and having her ashes in the garden was not important to me.
He came later with the certificate from the new pet crematory in Cancun. www.paraisoanimalcancun.com
It says he was prayed over and has gone to nicer pastures with her Pastor.
Sunday morning, the garbage men came, looking for her and the others. In past years, police officers put dead dogs in garbage bags during the night so the garbage men could pick them up before children went out.
Later in the day, people came buy and said there was a cute stray here, another one there, that didn't take the poison and needed homes. The Maya plant lady, Lucila, said she knew a Lora look-alike, a skinny male, near La Bruja, needed a home. Alison at Amigos los Animales has a cute guy, too.
Because it is considered against nature, sterilization has not gained much popularity here. Status breeds like "bull terri" have. Then, they are turned loose when failure to manage a household means no food for the dogs. They eat from garbage cans, often returning to their old homes to sleep. But they are dirty street dogs, a menace.
Can't the people in charge see the difference? Have they never experienced unconditional love? Are they so short sighted to not see that children suffer, lose faith in governance as they grow up? That children could play on surfaces the poison has touched and die themselves?
Lora's poison was on the steps inside the gate of Federico's house, where Baut laid without moving as Lora took the meat, meat from a bull that was euthanized after being hit by a truck on its way to tonight's bull fight.
There is a lot wrong in paradise. The door to door vendors came yesterday with neighborhood body counts and inquiries about our Lora. Pobrecita, they said, and walked away, slowly shaking their heads and looking back. Then, I cried.
