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By Root 454 0

surgeons are on call to provide emergency treatment. Given the extent of Oogy’s injuries, had he been taken to that facility following the raid in which he was found, it is a virtual certainty that he would have been destroyed. The surgeons would have been faced with hours of costly procedures that, given the severity of the wounds and the myriad other medical problems they would have had to deal with, might well have proved futile. On top of that, the SPCA did not have unlimited resources to rehabilitate fighting dogs, particularly at the expense of the other animals in its care. There was no way of determining in advance whether rehabilitation efforts would be successful; after these efforts had been made, a fighting dog might still pose a threat to other animals, or even humans, in which case it could never be made available for adoption. Since time, effort, and money spent on rehabilitation attempts meant that resources would be denied to other dogs with a real likelihood of being adopted, fighting dogs almost invariably would be destroyed. The chances of a mutilated fighting dog being rehabilitated, even if it could have been saved through hours of surgery and postsurgical treatment, and then adopted were beyond remote.

At the time of Oogy’s rescue, Ardmore was the only animal hospital in the immediate area to offer after-hours emergency room treatment. Had the police called the Montgomery County SPCA after hours, when the facility’s operations were closed, a dispatcher would have had the authority to direct the police to take a wounded dog to Ardmore’s ER. The Montgomery County SPCA has no record of that happening, and no follow-up report, which would have been generated had they directed the police there. In fact, the SPCA did not pick up or receive any fighting dogs at all on the weekend that Oogy was found. When I asked the SPCA’s director of operations whether the presence of a bait dog would have necessarily meant that there had to have been fighting dogs at the site, and wondered why none had been taken to the SPCA as a result of the raid in which Oogy was found, the director told me that very often the owners “drop the dogs” — let them loose so that they will not be charged with animal cruelty. “The dogs usually turn up in a couple of days,” he told me, “either as strays or when they corner somebody on the roof of their car.”

I later learned that another possible reason no other fighting dogs were found in the raid is that dogs being used for street fighting are often kept at a different location from where they are fought. Since those who fight dogs are usually not concerned with providing proper care for them, the dogs are often stashed in abandoned properties so that if they are discovered, there will be no way to find the owners. And to make detection more difficult, dogfighters also regularly change the locations where they train the dogs and hold the fights.

The fact that no other dogs were found in the raid in which Oogy was discovered also suggests that Oogy may have been abandoned after he was attacked. Since there were no other animals in the house, there would have been no reason for anyone to stay there with a dying dog, especially a dog that had been abused when it was alive.

In the absence of any evidence that the Montgomery County SPCA directed that Oogy be taken to the Ardmore ER, I’m left with only one explanation as to how Oogy got to the hospital — and although it is speculative, it makes the most sense to me. I believe that Oogy was found in a local police operation, which is consistent with Dr. Bianco’s recollection, and because the raid was local, the police knew about the emergency services that were available after hours through Ardmore. My best guess is that some animal-loving cop found a mutilated, dying puppy and, on his or her own initiative, brought the dog to the emergency services at Ardmore to try to save its life.

In the end, the only important thing is the fact that Oogy was discovered and brought in for treatment. I can never know why the fighting dog that attacked Oogy,