Ragnar's Story
About 10 years ago I moved to the foothills of Southern California. The rustic landscape was much
more picturesque than my previous home; however, I did not know that the beauty of the place belied a
very upsetting secret......animal dumping. My first experience with this occurred when I was taking a
shortcut home through a completely uninhabited stretch of road. I noticed a chow sitting in a
clearing, waiting. It quickly dawned on me that this was not a logical sight and I turned the car
around, only to quickly realize that he had been dumped there. Evidently people had been here before
me and had left food for him, so I added a meal of my own from the back of my car. Days passed and he
befriended no one, so animal control was called. Several days after that he was trapped and given to
an animal rescue group.
The day that he was caught I drove up to the site to check on him, and to my shock found a huge,
extremely thin German Shepherd tied to a tree. He had been left with a can of water which he could not
reach because the cord around his neck was too short. To this day I can still see the expectant
look on his face, as if the people who did this to him would be back soon and the whole bizarre episode
would end. I got out of my car, quickly determined that he was not vicious, and gave him some of the
food I had been carrying for the chow. He was so hungry that he ate 44 ounces of canned food and then
laid down and put his head in my lap.
I knew that he would not survive the night with the packs of coyotes and various mountain lions who
prowled the area, so made the snap decision to put him in my car and take him home. Since it was
January and relatively cold, I made a base camp for him in the garage with a bed, food, water, and a
comfort station. This would allow me the time to socialize him with my other dogs and cats, if it
were to be possible at all. Two days later I took him to the vet and got another
surprise. He had been the victim of some sort of extremely sloppy and low grade neutering, of which
he still carried all the stitches. He was sore and infected, requiring treatment with antibiotics.
I had always maintained a wish list of all the dog breeds I wanted to own (read rescue as I do not
purchase animals from breeders) and had told myself that one day I would own two German Shepherds to be
named Richard and Cosima after the German composer Richard Wagnar and his wife Cosima. Well, I now had
Richard, but the name was a disaster.....everyone thought it was weird, people called him Ricky, he
had no clue what his name was. Finally I combined the name into Ragnar, a wonderful stately sounding
name. Years later, a woman from Finland explained to me that the name was a reference to the final battle
fought by the Nordic warriors before they reach Valhalla.....how prophetic that became!
Ragnar spent the first few months of his life obsessively looking for his previous owner. Any
time we passed a small pickup truck he peered in with such consistency that I was able to construct a
profile of the previous owner, if the term should even be used. His loyalty was such that he firmly
believed that whomever that person was he would return someday. At the same time Ragnar was
fiercely devoted to me. He spent all of his time keeping track of where I was ( he had long since
moved into the house on a full time basis), making sure I was safe, and occasionally letting himself
play with my other animals.
When I found Ragnar he weighed 77 pounds, and when he had recovered and filled in he weighed 120
pounds. However, for such a huge dog he was amazingly gentle. He took his place in the pack and
never challenged my alpha, an aging Aussie who was a character in his own right. He expressed almost no
interest in my cats once he was sucker punched four times in the face by a Maine Coon kitten. However,
he remembered. Whenever I brushed her, which she hated and which resulted in some loud wailing, he
would laugh and roll on the floor as if the joke was on her.
The only remnants of his previous mistreatment were disclosed by his fear of abandonment and his fear of
loud noises. He failed dog training because any time we were told to drop the leash he ran back to
my car. He even ran across a tennis court and back to my car during a professional match because he
wanted to make sure that I was not planning on leaving him there. Thunder, fireworks, nail guns,
jackhammers were also his enemies. I guessed that he had been used as some sort of a guard dog, but
had failed and hence been abandoned.
Our lives continued happily for eight years. My older dogs eventually passed away, I acquired
another rescue from a school parking lot, we moved to a new house, and we were together through
everything, good and bad. Ragnar became the majestic alpha.
One day I noticed an almost imperceptible stumble as he walked. It was so faint that I asked friends to
watch him walk to see if they could ascertain the cause. We all agreed that he was stumbling on some
tiny pebble, or had something in the pad of his foot, which never materialized. This was the first
clue that something was wrong.
Conclusion.
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