Blind Pup: Tail-Wagging Is Temporary

They called at night, nervously, from a phone booth.

Their little one was 6 months old; he had something wrong with his eyes. They were leaving town and couldn’t take care of him any longer.

Their little one, a blind collie puppy, was found a few days later wandering bewildered through the streets of Torrance and was taken to an animal shelter. In the days since, the puppy has found a champion, but not a home.

Cookie Routman, who received the call for help, has saved the puppy from being “put down,” paid his veterinary bills and found him a temporary home and a name to fit what one vet called his “gem of a personality”--Sterling.

But there is little more she can do for the unusual blue merle puppy--marked with swirls of dark gray fur--who needs his own Seeing Eye dog buddy, in a home of his own.

For Routman, Sterling is not just another of the thousands of dogs regularly dumped on Los Angeles streets. “It’s bad enough to leave a healthy dog on the streets,” she said, “but a blind one?”

‘Breed Rescue List’

Routman’s name is on a computerized “breed rescue list”--names circulated in animal shelters of people willing to help a particular kind of dog. Since she listed her name last summer, there have been scores of collie “help” calls, but none quite like the one that came that January night.

“The people tell me they’re at a pay phone, and have a 6-month-old blue merle collie, purebred but no papers,” Routman recalled. “I asked her name, to call her back. She said, ‘Our phone’s been disconnected,’ ” and said she would call Routman instead. She never did.

“That kind of upset me,” said Routman, a secretary with a Westwood accounting firm. “I wondered what would happen. My last question to her was, ‘Is the dog in good health?’ She said, ‘I don’t think he sees real well.’ ”

The puppy was, in fact, blind, and the staff at the SPCA shelter in Hawthorne knew he would be a problem. People looking for a pet at first thought he was adorable. But “they would change their minds when they found (he is blind),” said the shelter supervisor, Sgt. Douglas Buck.

“With no takers, we were in a dilemma--we didn’t want to destroy him,” said Buck, but because of crowding and costs, they knew they would soon have to. So they called Routman, whose apartment is already crowded with four cats and a collie of her own.

She got to work, leaning on friends with big backyards, calling a community newspaper, which sent a photographer to take the puppy’s picture as “dog of the week.” But by the time he got there, the dog had a fever and a runny nose, said Buck, which “unfortunately made him even less desirable.” So there was no photo, no article, and no home.

Last-Minute Decision

There was only euthanasia facing him when Routman sped through the streets on Feb. 10, crying all the way, picked him up at the shelter moments before it closed, paid his state-mandated $20 neuter fee and took him to her vet, who kept his clinic open late that night.

“The term for this is ‘collie eye anomaly,’ ” breeding-related eye damage of varying degrees, said Dr. Richard Martin of the Brentwood Pet Clinic. “I don’t think the dog has much vision. I did put it through what I call a maze test. There was a lot of gentle bumping into objects.”

Martin’s concern is the dog’s age, and his quality of life. “He’s got a lot of years. Potentially, this type of dog could be very happy,” but as he has seen time and again, “many people on impulse take something that is a lot of responsibility and then can’t follow through.”

Adaptable to Handicaps

Still, “it’s amazing how quickly they adapt” to handicaps, Martin said. “He has an absolute gem of a personality--really a very sweet dog.”

Last week, several days and about $300 later, Sterling left the vet’s for a Topanga Canyon foster home. At least for a while.

Routman fears he will fall out of favor with his temporary host, whose slippers Sterling was chewing even as the man told Routman on the phone, “You forget sometimes he’s blind.”

“He’s been through so much--abandoned, the shelter, a vet’s hospital for a week,” Routman fretted. “I want to find a special home, perhaps with a patient dog so he can learn.”