My Dog Walker

My dog walker back north is a feisty woman in her 70's with a vague past. For as long as I have known her, she has owned 4 dogs which are her family. When one dog dies, another takes its place.  She has spoken of 3 husbands in her past.  Her family consists of one brother in Arizona. I've know her since before I had Zoey, when my dog Rebe was alive.

Her dogs have always been her life and she does dog training although it is the type of training for performance shows, not regular dogs. She much prefers dogs to people.

Recently I happened to speak with her.  I haven't had much contact in the past year since I'm doing more walking myself, not being lazy about dog walking.

What  happened to her is sad but predictable..  She was walking her dogs  in a heavily wooded spot with high cliffs looming over our creek.  On Google Maps, it is labeled a "Park' but it is a bramble filled no mans land with narrow dirt paths, not tended by any government entity.

My dog walker slipped and fell down the cliff.  On the way down she lost her cell.  It took her 3 hours to drag herself up.  She had injured her hip.  The next day, injured still, she went to Urgent Care and they sent her to the hospital with a broken hip.  She was in the hospital for I think she said 6 weeks....

A neighbor said she would take the dogs to boarding, not the boarding my dog walker uses but one about 20 miles away.  Once there this neighbor came to the hospital and had my dog walker sign away her dogs for adoption.  Two of her dogs are large and the neighbor explained that my dog walker couldn't care for them any more.  That's probably true.  Still, it seems so cruel.  I'm sure parts of this story were skipped over.  The neighbor then had a crew clean up my walkers yard and home, down to the magnets on her refrigerator.  My dog walker was outraged but there must have been more to the story here, anyway.  You just can't clean out someone's yard and home without permission.

Her dogs are gone and she won't see them again. My dog walker said she cried for days.  I feel really awful for her.  Still, she might have seen this coming.  Something like this happened to her in a similar fashion a few years ago when she fell down by the river while walking her dogs,.  In that case, someone was around and helped her up and got her back to her car.

She said she is getting another dog.  A yellow lab puppy from a breeder she has used before.  I tried to talk her into getting an older dog from the county shelter but she wants a dog she can train to use in her classes.