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Yesterday I had asked Chris, the father figure from my preceding post, to write a summary that I could present to my friend at the Times of India. The objective is to publish an article that exposes the truth about the deceptive ways of this callous man. Hopefully, the article will generate awareness with animal rights activists and organizations that can help us stop this man from selling sickly, mistreated animals to unsuspecting families. The following is the unedited letter that I received from Chris earlier today:

Raj the Sick Dog Seller

Answering a classified ad in the newspaper we visited Raj in Old Goa to purchase a puppy for our daughter.  We should have been alerted by the fact that he had no proper kennels or sanitation and merely kept the animals in his small house.  Unfortunately we ignored these warning signs and my daughter chose a cute Cocker Spaniel.  I was concerned about the look of one of her eyes but Raj assured us that it was just some hair in the eye and would come out on its own.  We paid Raj 7,500 rs for the puppy and he recommended a veterinarian in Miramar named Anchina to take care of the vaccinations.  When we visited Anchina she vaccinated the puppy and told us that the eye problem was a very serious condition that could result in blindness and would likely require surgery to correct.  Even the surgery she explained was not a guarantee of success.  In fact Anchina said “this puppy has no future”.  After wrestling with this thought for a few days we decided to return the puppy.  Our daughter was heart-broken as she had quickly grown attached to the cute little Cocker Spaniel.  We returned the puppy to Raj and he promised to find us a good healthy dog.  After a couple of weeks he showed up at our home with a St. Bernard pup about 2.5 months old.  Our daughter liked the St. Bernard very much and after thinking about it for a few days we decided to go ahead and get it.  We drove back to Old Goa on a Saturday afternoon and our daughter selected the cuter of two St. Bernards that he had available.  I paid Raj an additional 17,000 rs and we took the puppy home.  My daughter named her Ossa.  The next day as we played with and examined the new puppy more carefully, we found that she was infested with hundreds of tiny, baby ticks.  By Monday morning the puppy was quite sick with vomiting and diarrhea.  We took Ossa to the veterinarian in Miramar and she administered various antibiotics, medicines and an IV drip to battle dehydration.  The IV drip treatment took 2 to 3 hours and had to be done morning and afternoon.  My daughter made the trip twice a day and lovingly held the puppy in the vet’s office during these treatments which totalled 5+ hours each day.  Despite the very best efforts of the veterinarian and my daughter, Ossa died Friday evening.  My daughter was and remains inconsolable.  Her sorrow is something that will be with her for a very long time.  As for Raj, the dealer of sick dogs to children, when I confronted him he showed no remorse or pity for either the dog or my daughter.  In his words: “You should have selected the other St. Bernard, it’s still alive.”  At no time did he offer any sort of compensation or refund for either puppy.

In total Raj received 24,500 rs from us for two sick puppies.  We spent an additional 5,000 rs or so on medical treatments for them.  These expenditures bought us sorrow and heartbreak.  That is the pitfall for dealing with unscrupulous pet sellers.

For the international readers here: $1 USD is about 43 rs. Therefore, Chris paid about:

• $175 for the Cocker Spaniel
• $570 for the St. Bernard
• $116 for Medical Treatment

This is an absurd amount of money in India. Such is the price of heartache?

Please contact me for additional information if you or someone you know can help us.

Let me preclude this post by stating that I don’t consider myself to be an angry or vindictive person and that I tend to believe that the vast majority of people on the planet are neither good nor evil.

Unfortunately, every now and then I meet a person that has a story that really makes me rethink my philosophy on society at large. This is one such situation.

So, without further adieu, I propose a question:

What kind of socially and morally-challenged asshole would knowingly sell sick puppies to innocent young children?

Imagine the heart-break of a father receiving a phone call and all he hears are the panic-stricken screams and cries of his youngest daughter. Now imagine the feeling of loss in a young girl who has spent two long weeks attempting to nurse a dying puppy back to health; Spending three hours, twice per day (yes, six hours per day) at a veterinary clinic holding a sickly puppy while the IV fluids are absorbed into his delicate body.

Why six hours of IV fluids per day you ask? This poor puppy has an infection so strong that the minutest amounts of water are enough to send him into painful bouts of vomiting, dry-heaving and explosive diarrhea. Imagine how strong of a bond you must have to endure all of this for another living being on your own accord.

We all lost animals as children. It’s just sad that a person can have so much greed in his heart that the money received from a single sale is enough to offset the pain caused to a young child and her family.

I’m going to end this here as I seem to be working myself up into a rather livid state of mind. Suffice it to say, the Father in this story is doing everything he can to put this asshole of a puppy salesman permanently out of business. I’m doing everything I can to help him and if you know someone who can assist us in our goal, please contact me.

I leave you with a quote:

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
- Immanual Kant

I’ve not fully realized my goal of World domination as of yet; however, I’ve found a few spare minutes to recreate this blog to share my adventures with those in need of a light read. For those that don’t know, I had a string of bad luck with my hosting company that resulted in the catastrophic loss of all of my data. This new version of my blog includes a nifty secure back-up system that insures the integrity of my data regardless of what Dreamhost has to say about it.

In other news: Life has been relatively amazing the past few months. In the coming days (read: weeks), I’ll try to write a few posts that elaborate a bit on the events that have occurred recently. For now however, it’s 5:00 am and I have to wake up a tad on the early side in the morning, so… I’m off to bed. Sorry to leave you hanging but please do check back soon as I’ve made it a personal goal (albeit of minimal significance) to write at least one new post per week.

Ta ta for now.