WestieMed - The Pedigree Foundation Grant

The Pedigree Foundation Grant

The Pedigree Brand believes that every dog deserves a loving home. To ensure the brand was maximizing its efforts to help four-legged friends in need, they created The Pedigree Foundation. The Pedigree Foundation is a philanthropic organization dedicated to providing grants to support other programs that help make life better for homeless dogs. WestieMed is pleased to announce it received a grant from The Pedigree Foundation in November 2010 for the third consecutive year.

WestieMed wishes to express its thanks and gratitude to The Pedigree Foundation for this support. This grant enabled WestieMed to help save a timid little Westie named Lacy...

Lacy

Lacy’s story begins in mid-May, when a small and extremely skittish dog was first spotted in a neighbor’s yard. The little dog’s hair was so matted it hung from an emaciated frame like pieces of an old rug. He obviously had been out on his own for a long time, and he was hungry enough to venture close to where the neighbor’s dog was in heat – a fact also noticed by some large male dogs from the area. It was not a good situation.

The neighbor thought that underneath the matted mess was a cairn terrier, and since her mother was a volunteer with cairn rescue she told her what was happening next door. An hour later, the mother had covered the 60 miles to her daughter’s house and set about trying to entice the dog to come to her with some lunchmeat. But the little dog would come no closer than 6-8 feet before turning and running away – close enough for the mother to realize it wasn’t a cairn but a very, very dirty Westie.

After several hours with no success, she set out some canned dog food and thought to try again in the morning. Surely, that would do the trick. But the next day was the same, and the day after that. Days turned to weeks and weeks to months, and still the little dog refused to be caught.

It was a pattern that continued throughout the summer as she made three or four trips a week to her daughter’s house, trying to get the little dog to trust her, trying to get it to safety. Still, he was having none of it. Although he would come closer now, would actually take food from his benefactor’s hand, he remained skittish and would flee at any sudden movement.

Finally, in late August, it took a desperate lunge to finally bring the drama to a close… “I tackled him and managed to get a handful of fur,” his ever-patient rescuer relates. “I held tight and closed him into my arms. He struggled against me. I buried my face in his dirty coat and cried. It was finally over. He was safe!”

Seven hours of grooming turned the erstwhile cairn into a wonderfully white Westie, and revealed that this “he” was actually a she! A visit to the vet next day to arrange immediate spaying brought yet another surprise – the little girl now named Lacy was heartworm positive. She was in dire need of treatment if there was to be any chance of saving her life, and that was going to be more costly than her rescuers could afford. So they turned to WestieMed for help.

The grant WestieMed received from the Pedigree Foundation was used to help pay for Lacy’s heartworm treatment. As a result, Lacy today is a typical loved and loving Westie -- sweet, saucy and very full of herself. Not to mention very, very lucky!