Meet Bad, Bad Leroy Brown!

Leroy Brown is a puppy mill survivor! (Everybody say "Yay!") He was plopped into a St. Louis shelter from whence one of our fearless Missouri volunteers snabbled him up and kept him for a few days and then he made tracks with a Wisconsin volunteer all the way up to the tippy top of Illinois where he will be fostered by yet another volunteer: a vet tech who will be able to give him all the specialized treatments he may require. Out of the frying pan, into the cushy chair, eh, Leroy? Here's what his transporter had to say about her two days on the road with the handsome and eligible Leroy Brown:

"Well, I'm only a small cog in the Leroy Brown wheel, but we did have quite an eventful road trip.

I picked him up from [the volunteer] in Mo. who had gotten him out of the shelter. He's got a neck injury that [his foster mom] will be getting a diagnosis and a treatment plan for. The problem causes him to have some very violent muscle spasms which will often pitch him face forward to the ground. It's quite pathetic to see.

He was feeling mighty poorly when I got to the house. He was not taking his medication orally, didn't want to walk, hadn't eaten or drunk for a day, and just seemed beaten down by it all, and so we both felt a vet visit before he took a long car drive was really necessary. We made arrangements
for us to see the vet who had seen him earlier in the week. After a sad and tearful farewell between this poor, sad boy and his loving rescuer, I took him to the animal hospital where we waited. And waited. Finally we were taken in back where he was examined and given some fluids, a steroid shot, and a pain relief shot.

I could have returned to Milwaukee, but that didn't seem fair to someone who was as miserable as he, so later that evening, we holed up in a motel room in a chain that has the marvelous good taste to use a Frenchie for a spokesdog. As the medications began to take effect, he perked up greatly. Especially at the sight of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and the holiest of St. Louis pizza Grails, bacon pizza with extra tomato sauce from Imo's. This Missouri boy knew what he had to do and abandoned the few remaining crumbs of the Quarter Pounder to enjoy himself some pizza-pie.

In the morning, fueled by the last bit of Imo's finest and having taken his pills with a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit (there is a culinary pattern establishing here, aina?) we took off in my Bug for parts north.
It was a leisurely trip, we visited many interesting rest stops going up the I- Double Nickel (as a matter of fact ALL the rest stops. Steroids'll do that to ya.) Many sniffs were sniffed, and one extremely interesting bush got him almost to lift his leg in reply, but the steroids weren't quite that miraculous. (I laughed. I admit it. I'm a bad, bad person, and I laughed. Only his dignity was injured.)

We got to Leroy's lovely foster home in northern Illinois in the late afternoon of a beautiful Indian summer day. His wobbly gait was met with great sympathy as he pitched and yawled his way around his new foster house. He's a lucky boy, a nice boy, a very good boy and I expect to hear great things of him."

In an upcoming entry, you'll learn more about Leroy Brown's visit to the UW vet school, promises

The Frog Princess