A funny thing happened on FB....

For once this is not really a rant... just a funky weird thing that happened tonight courtesy of facebook, google search engine, and Kijiji ads..... I noticed when I logged into FB that a friend of mine posted that her friend came home from work tonight to find a dog locked in her backyard. A special breed, not one that 'everyone has', but still kinda common. She posted his specs and I reposted them on my profile page because I have lots of friends in the neighbouring town where this doggie was found. I figured 'hey, it's worth a shot. Small town, might find someone that knows who the dog's owner is'.

Less than 1 minute later, one of my friends posted a link she found on a kijiji ad that was only posted 2 hours earlier, showing a male dog of the same breed and color that they were trying to find a home for. The family posted that they were moving to BC and could not take the dog. But since the ad was only just posted like maybe an hour and a bit before the dog was found, I thought 'nah... that cant be the same one! the family would literally have been posting an ad to find him a new home while he was actually off galvanting loose around town'. .... but then I thought 'it's a small town though, and it's a bit weird to have a black male dog of this particular breed listed at the same time'.... so I went ahead and posted the kijiji link on my other friend's page.

Meanwhile, myself and my ad-finding-friend were saying it would be sad if this was indeed the same dog, how freaky it was the ad was just posted this evening, etc and whammo - the response comes back that the found-dog answers to the name of the ad-dog! Thank goodness they posted his name because that was the ultimate best way to test. A bit of an odd name for this kind of dog (part of the name is Pug, and this dog is NOT a pug lol)... so it was almost too good to be true! It's the same darn dog!

So thanks to FB, the rightful owner was found, but at the same time, the owner might get a nasty surprise the next time they check their email. The dog has a bum back leg covered in abscesses and the person who found him is a dog lover/owner and is NOT happy. She is taking him to the vet in the morning and will probably end up contacting the SPCA to see if she has to give the dog to it's owners or if they have some advice. Would you want to give this dog back if you found him in this condition and then found out that the family wants to give him away anyway?

Then I go back to my page and find that another friend from that town sees that dog running loose, alone, ALL the time. Just saw him running around tonight in fact, but it's far from the first time. She has wondered many times why his family lets him out like that, where he could get hurt or worse - hurt someone else and end up getting put down (because he is normally a very friendly dog according to those who have now encountered him). And now here he is, in someone else's locked (???) backyard on the very night the family offers him up to a new home.

Ya, I don't think this pup will be going back to his current owners. I think he will be fast tracked to a new home and who knows, his current owners could end up with a fine or worse. Not that I love all the animal bylaws out there - my old neighbourhood kids used to let my old dog out when I was at school or work and I paid over $300 in fines when the SPCA picked him up. That ticked me off because in my opinion, those kids vandalized and trespassed MY property by jimmying the locks no matter what we put on there to stop them, and then let my dog go out running. Luckily he was never hurt, but I was some ticked to have to pay over $100 each time for 'Dog Running At Large'. My dog was big so I remember joking with one officer that perhaps it should be called 'Large Dog Running'. He didn't laugh. What a grouch!

anyway aside from allll that - I just thought it was a pretty cool thing to happen. By chance a few people see the post and the mystery is solved in less than 3 minutes! Some people hate the internet and think it's a bad seed but I love it. It's great. I have found family members from my dad's side that I never knew existed or never thought I would find, just by clicking a few buttons on FB. I have discovered that my boyfriend's great grandfather was an MP in the early 1920s, the first MP for a particular party at that time in fact, and we found photos, info, etc that was super cool. And we found out about a doggie who appears to have been mistreated and will hopefully be going to a good happy home very soon :) But what were the chances of that eh???