by Linda Neering
We had just moved into our new home in Indiana. I had three young girls in the car with me. At dusk we were driving on a country road to take our company home. We witnessed an older brown dog walking the road, back and forth, back and forth. We stopped at a few homes, but the dog wasn't theirs but they had seen it pacing the road for a while. We stopped a few times to try to get it into the car, but we couldn't, and I told the girls we could not pick up a strange dog with our hands, that it may be scared and bite us. On our last attempt to get it into our car, we saw a truck speeding down the road. We heard it screech to stop from hitting the dog. When the truck resumed driving the dog was gone, but not on the road or in a ditch. We followed the truck. About l/2 mile down the road, there was the dog in the middle of the road, injured but not dead. This truck had drug this poor dog all that way. We were all upset and the girls were screaming and crying for me to do something. I went to a few houses asking if someone had a gun to put it out of it's misery. No one was willing to help. I couldn't run it over myself to end it's misery. I don't know if I would have had the courage and it would have been too traumatic on the girls. So we left the scene and I called the county police as soon as I could. I never did find out what happened to this poor creature. It had no collar. I believe it was blind which is why it stayed on the pavement. I was told it was probably dumped in hopes someone else would take it in.
The next few days this image was stuck in all of our minds, of this dog drug by a truck for l/2 mile. We now wonder had we not stopped to intervene in the first place, this might not have happened. To the person who abandoned this dog or lost it and to the driver of the truck, I can only pray for you to develop a more caring heart, but my prayers are more for the brown, old, blind, mixed breed dog that I was unable to help or save, that your suffering was short and I pray that I will see you again at Rainbow's Bridge.