Free The Dog With Nine Lives by Della Galton

after the incident and had found a safer place to live. And Tony took the old tree down to the council tip to make sure it couldn’t happen again.
    I knew we would be less lax about getting rid of our old Christmas trees in future, but I am still amazed by that incident, both at the blackbird’s fatal decision to build a nest in a Christmas tree and at Lindy’s ability to eat almost anything.
    A few months later, her penchant for eating rubbish was very nearly her downfall. We have an old lean-to-cum-wood-store next door to our kitchen. It’s where we keep our freezer and our bikes and the car boot sale stuff I sell to raise money for DAWG.
    The previous year we’d had a bit of a problem with rats. They got into the rafters of our old house and sometimes I had heard them skittering about in the joists. Also, once, I’d gone out to the wood-store and come face to face with one sitting on the logs.
    I don’t mind rats, but I was not at all keen on sharing my house with them, so we’d put out some rat poison in little trays high up on the upright freezer and out of reach of the dogs.
    One evening, I was just out there getting something out of the freezer for dinner when I heard the phone ring in the house. I raced in to answer it, leaving the door to the wood-store open.
    When I got back downstairs I saw that the dogs had taken advantage of the situation to have a root around in the wood-store. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, but then I saw that Lindy had something in her mouth. When I asked her to give it to me she obliged with a wag of her tail and I saw to my horror that it was one of the plastic trays that we’d used to put rat poison in.
    It must have been knocked off the freezer – presumably by a rat – but the burning question in my mind, was had it still contained poison? And if it had, had the dogs eaten any? All of them were milling about out there.
    None of the blue pellets lay on the ground. I knew it was pretty unlikely that there had been any poison left in the tray, but I couldn’t take the risk. I phoned the vets.
    â€˜Bring them down,’ Kate said. ‘We’d better err on the side of caution.’
    So off we all went to the vets where Lindy, Maggie and Abel were given emetics to make them sick.
    â€˜I think she has just used up another of her nine lives,’ I joked to one of the receptionists who knew Lindy well.
    â€˜I think you’re right,’ she said, stroking Lindy’s soft brown ears. ‘How many is it now?’
    I didn’t answer her, but later that night, I ticked them off on my fingers: number one was the beach rescue; number two was probably the rescue mission that had brought her back to England; three was the herd of cows; four was the river; five was the cancer; six was the forest; seven was the haemolytic anaemia; eight the dodgy catch on the Toyota; nine the rat poison. She’d had nine lives already. I looked at her curled up on the settee, with not a care in the world. I decided to stop torturing myself.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    So this is goodbye
    T OWARDS THE END OF 2008 we’d lost Abel. The end had come quickly for him. He’d been perfectly fine, eating and drinking as normal, and then he’d had a seizure one Friday evening. Luckily Tony and I were both home so we were able to comfort him and be there for him, and the on-call vet thought that he might well recover, but sadly it wasn’t to be. We said goodbye to one of the sweetest-natured dogs we had ever had the pleasure to live with.
    It felt very strange only having two dogs in the house. It was oddly quiet and very tidy. Once the novelty of not having to clean and vacuum so much wore off, I realised that I didn’t like only having two dogs around. I wasn’t sure we were ready for another dog of our own – we had to heal first – but I thought I would quite like to foster a dog again.
    We had fostered in the past for DAWG