Letters
from Hagan's breeder.
29
May 2003
Judy
is a friend of mine. I put these webpages up here after Hagan
died, having shared some of their struggle in the emails she would
send me. I knew how hope flared for her and died, how hard she
tried to keep her beloved dog alive and make him well, the hell she
went through right along with him. I'd been through a long and
eventually fatal illness with my young GSD,Thunder, so I knew
something of what it was like for her to admit defeat and perform that
final act of kindness for Hagan.
And
I understood her dismay and hurt and anger when she received a manilla
envelope from Hagan's breeder on the 28th of July, 2001, two months
after his death. A note enclosed in the envelope expressed condolences
on the death of "Tess" and, a little further on, said that
if Judy bought Microhydrin capsules from her, Tess could be taken off
thyroid medicine. Along with this heartfelt sympathy was an
audio tape and a video on the breeder's line of multivitamins.
Perhaps
the breeder was so shaken by Hagan's death, she couldn't remember his
name. Or his gender. Or that Mycrohydrin wasn't likely to be any
more use to him than thyroid medicine now.
Even
though the main purpose for the letter seems to have been to promote
the sale of her products, you'd think someone could have taken a
moment to proofread it, along with the few lines of condolence added
to demonstrate her concern for...well, whichever dog Judy had lost.
Still,
who can blame her for confusing them? When you've bred so many
dogs, so many that it's cheaper to give the surplus away than feed
them and hope for a buyer, you can hardly be expected to keep their
names straight.
On
the second anniversary of Hagan's death, the breeder sent Judy another
letter.
In
it, the breeder said how sad she was to see Judy's opinion of her.
Evidently, someone steered her by this site and she read the story of
Hagan's death. It affected her so profoundly that she felt
called upon to tell Judy not to come back to her for another dog.
That
it will be a cold day in hell before Judy does any such thing never
seems to have occurred to her.
She
claimed to be confused about Judy's attitude "especially as you
have come back to me for three dogs". Indeed she is
confused; only Hagan and Tess came from this breeder.
Perhaps it was the picture of Riley here that led her to think there
were three. No, sorry. Riley is a rescue and a truer type
of the Giant Schnauzer than she breeds. One would think she
could tell just by looking at him that he wasn't hers. But then
she was upset over Judy's thoughtlessness in talking openly about the
hypothyroidism of both dogs that came from her Skansen kennels and the
congenital epilepsy that killed Judy's beloved Hagan.
It
was generous of her, she said, to allow Judy to have a retired
champion. She meant Tess, the dog who came to Judy with a dead
tooth, incontinent and hypothyroid and without any health records,
records that were asked for and never sent - Tess, who had outlived
her usefulness and was just taking up space at four years old and who
was adopted before Hagan's seizures began, as the breeder would have
known if she'd rummaged through her records.
She
sent along an article on a diet that will 'completely cure' seizures,
on this second anniversary of Hagan's death, with the admonition to
"read it before you throw the blame on others."
Her
timing and her sensitivity speak for themselves.
Gil.
Ash
webmaster
