My son-in-law gave my late husband’s dog away while I was in hospital — so I found her at the shelter eleven days later, and they would not let him take her back.
He told me she had run off.
He said it on the Tuesday, standing at the end of the hospital bed with his car keys in his hand, and he said it in about nine seconds.
Gate must have been left open. They’d driven round. Put it on the village page. No luck.
Then he asked me if I wanted anything from the shop.
My name is Eulalia Brannigan. I’m seventy-four.
I had gone in on the ninth for a left hip, which I had been putting off since the spring because of the dog.
Nellie is a border collie cross, nine years old, black and white with one ear that does not stand up.
My husband Horace got her from a farm near Ardwick in 2017 and she was his before she was mine.
He died in the February of 2022 in the back bedroom, and she lay on the floor on his side of that bed for eleven weeks afterwards.
I am not going to be sentimental about this, because the facts are enough.
That dog does not run off. She does not go past the end of the drive without a person.
She is nine and she has arthritis in both hips, which is a thing I know about because I pay forty-one dollars a month for the tablets.
Dane said the gate.
There is no gate. There is a cattle grid and a hedge and there has not been a gate on that drive since 2019.
I lay in that bed for three more days and did not say anything about the gate.
Because I was two days out of surgery and I could not stand up, and because I did not know yet what I was dealing with.
My daughter Verity came on the Thursday and cried and said they had looked everywhere.
I believed her. I still believe her. She did not know.
That is the thing people get wrong about this kind of business. It is almost never both of them.
They had been staying at my house since the Saturday before the operation, to feed the dog and keep the pipes from freezing.
Dane has wanted me in a flat in Calderwood since 2023 and has said so to my face twice.
A woman of seventy-four with a bad hip and a farm collie on eleven acres is, in his words, not sustainable.
He is not a stupid man. He is a quantity surveyor and he thinks in obstacles, and the dog was an obstacle.
I came home on the twentieth on two crutches.
The house was clean. The bowls were gone. Somebody had put the bed and the brush and the lead in a bin bag in the outhouse.
You do not bag a dog’s bed on day two of a search.
That is when I stopped wondering.
I did not telephone Verity and I did not telephone him.
I sat down at the kitchen table and I rang the three shelters in this county in alphabetical order.
The second one was Calderwood County Animal Shelter, nine miles away.
A young man named Tobias asked me for a description and I gave him the ear.
He went quiet for about four seconds and then he said: “Can you hold on a moment.”
A woman came on. Her name is Fenella Ogunbiyi and she has run that place for sixteen years.
She asked me whether the dog was microchipped.
I said yes. Chipped in 2017 at the practice on Harrowfield Lane.
She asked me whose name was on the chip.
And I said mine. It has been mine since Horace died, because the vet changed it over for me in the March and I remember doing it because I cried in the car park.
Then Fenella said the sentence that has been in my head ever since.
“Mrs Brannigan, I need to tell you that the animal was not found straying. She was surrendered.”
Surrendered. On the eleventh of the month. Two days after I went in.
By a man who signed the form, and gave an address, and ticked the box that says the owner can no longer care for the animal.
I asked her what happens to a surrendered dog of nine with arthritis.
She did not answer that question and I did not make her.
I asked if I could come. She said come now.
My neighbour Casimir drove me because I cannot drive for six weeks.
It is a long low building with a lobby and a row of plastic chairs and four or five people waiting with carriers on their laps.
Fenella came out from behind the desk and did not shake my hand. She put her hand under my elbow.
And she walked me through the door and down the concrete aisle with the kennels on both sides.
