Scarlett and her friend Mia lived in squalid conditions until finding a loving home with Lynn Sudbury-Riley
Mia and Scarlett
In the summer of 2011 we answered a Preloved ad for a Blenheim cavalier called Mia who, the ad said, was six years old. We travelled to Yorkshire from Liverpool and found ourselves at a farm, accessed down a dirt track. When we got to the farmhouse there were sheds and cages outside, and we counted 16 dogs of various breeds in the small yard. There were also others in cages. The house was filthy – like something out of the TV programme Life of Grime.
Mia was carried out to me in the yard: a terrified little girl who did not like to be stroked and could not look at us. She looked much older than six and my heart went out to her. The woman said she had bought her to breed from but she did not take so she was selling her on. I went into the kitchen to hand the money over and get a receipt. Mia creeped away into a corner and climbed into a wooden box – the kind of boxes you see in fruit and veg shops. The puppy farmer then said she had some litters of cavapoos and dumped a tiny puppy of about two to three weeks old in my hands while she got her receipt book.
Then a tiny ruby Cavalier ran in and jumped on Mia, and clung to her as though she was getting a piggy back. My husband said “Oh, you cannot split them up. We will take her too.” The puppy farmer replied that she wasn’t for sale because “she throws lovely pups” and pointed to a young ruby – one of Scarlett’s sons – that she was keeping as a stud dog.
Mia and Scarlett clung to each other
My husband (who was still outside looking into the kitchen because the stench was so bad he had started to retch) then began to offer more and more money for Scarlett. The puppy farmer refused until my husband said we were not going to take one without the other. Finally the woman succumbed and sold us Scarlett as well. She said she had Scarlett’s KC papers and gave them to me.
The girls smelled so badly that we were grateful it was a nice day and we could keep all the car windows open on the drive home. We stopped off at some services to give the girls a drink and when we carried them out of the car they were really frightened. My husband said he was sure they’d never seen traffic before, such was their sheer terror at the cars and the open space.
When we got home we carried them into the house and they both crawled under the kitchen table. We could not coax them out. Neither would eat, neither would come for a stroke, neither would look at us. They were clearly terrified. Their ears and tails were down, and they simply clung to each other. This was Saturday afternoon, and they remained like that for the rest of the weekend. Neither was housetrained.
The following Monday we put new collars and leads on them but could not coax them out of the house so we carried them to the car go to the vets. The vets was on a busy road and when we got them out of the car and put them on the pavement both crawled on their bellies and hid under the car. It was so distressing and pitiful to see their terror.
Mia days before she died
Mia was estimated – by three different vets – to be nine years old. This is when we also found that both had heart murmurs: Mia was graded four and Scarlett graded three. Both had severe ear infections – the vet scraped out what looked like thick black tar from their ears. Both had terrible teeth: Mia’s teeth were so bad that two came out of her mouth when the vet touched them, and there was green puss oozing from the holes in her gums.
Mia also had an infection around her vagina, and had lumps on her head like cysts. Mia’s ear infection had gone to her middle ear and she would stagger as though drunk and vomit on herself. Her ears were so badly damaged that she needed a major operation to fix them. Scarlett also had a luxating patella for which she needed surgery. It emerged later that Mia also had syringomyelia. We lost our beloved Mia in April last year, after spending literally thousands of pounds on her various medical conditions.
It took weeks of antibiotics to treat Scarlett’s ears and she needed many teeth removed. Her mental state, however, took much longer to fix. She would crawl on her belly and cower when we did something as simple as take her outside into the garden. She froze when she felt grass under her feet – she would scurry onto the patio and hated feeling the grass under her paws. It took months before either would come to us to be stroked and even longer for them to be housetrained.
Scarlett: rescued from the puppy farmer now battles MVD
After two years we heard Mia bark – Scarlett has never barked. In fact the only sound she has ever made is a blood-curdling screaming in her sleep which used to happen regularly but has thankfully stopped now. It was also about three years before Scarlett could actually stare into our faces: even when she eventually became happy to come to us for cuddles she would look away if we looked directly at her. She now enjoys a walk in the park but this literally took years of persuasion and coaxing.
Scarlett has now gone into full congestive heart failure. Her heart scan showed a severely enlarged heart with a badly damaged mitral valve. There was leakage into her lungs. She is currently responding well to a daily cocktail of heart drugs, but the vet has told us we are on borrowed time. Scarlett is Kennel Club registered and, while she had a grade three heart murmur, was bred from and her puppies were also registered with the KC.