Anxious Dog Owners Seek July 4th MIAs

If American dogs kept their own calendar, they would observe the Fourth of July not as a holiday, but as 24 hours of canine chaos.

While we bipeds were recovering Monday from a weekend of grilling, swilling and saluting our nation’s birthday with fireworks, Man’s Best Friend was licking his own wounds:

Fear. Confusion. Incarceration.

The period right after the holiday, when the noisy pop pop pop pop of fireworks that so delights humans sends keen-eared pooches into a panic, is the busiest time of the year at local animal shelters. Normally mellow mutts chew through backyard fences and crash down gates to flee the sounds of holiday mayhem. Some find their way home. Many don’t.

On Monday, some shelters reported their holding pens filled to overflowing with recovered pets, while desperate owners made last-ditch efforts to find their missing dogs.

The post-holiday period is “our equivalent of the day after Thanksgiving in the shopping world,” said Bill Harford, executive director of the Pomona Valley Humane Society and SPCA.

“They hear noise and get freaked out,” Harford said. “We have had cases where dogs run right through gates and even through plate-glass windows at this time of year.”

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The unhappy holiday ritual includes a sharp rise in the number of dogs struck dead by cars, and even hanged by their chains while trying to leap a fence. It also means answering the flood of pleas from frightened pet owners.

“I think every shelter across Orange County and Los Angeles County is having the same experience,” said Eileen Kinder of the Huntington Beach Humane Society. “Most shelters are definitely filled up with dogs and cats who have panicked because they’re hearing unfamiliar loud sounds and they run away seeking cover.”

Huntington Beach traditionally has a large Fourth of July celebration, which means the fifth of July finds many dogs at her shelter, Kinder said.

Although dogs who have fled in panic still show up at the Orange County pound, their numbers have dwindled as cities have outlawed fireworks, said Mark McDorman, chief of operations for Orange County Animal Control.

“There’s definitely a small rise in the number of dogs we pick up on the Fourth of July, even though it hasn’t been as frequent in recent years,” McDorman said. “Basically, when they hear all the loud noises they try to get away, and since they don’t know where it’s coming from they just run.”

Outside a Los Angeles County animal shelter in Baldwin Park, more than a dozen people, some carrying homemade fliers and photos, waited for the kennel to open at noon Monday.

Heidi Davies was near tears as she scanned the log of found dogs--to no avail. She had spent most of the weekend posting 1,000 fliers around the Hacienda Heights neighborhood where her 9-year-old Shar-pei, Fairmont, disappeared Friday after chewing through a fence.

“That’s my baby. He’s gone,” she said, pointing to a color photo mounted on the flier she had made.

Davies said she spent 40 hours hunting for her beloved pet, who is used to sleeping on a fur bed and eating cooked steak every night. Davies prowled the streets and parked a car with lost-dog posters in the windows at the nearby Vons, where Fairmont was last seen. Davies even called two pet detectives, but “they sounded like absolute clowns on the phone,” she said.

“I’ve had one bite of food since Friday. I take pills to go to sleep, My house is silent,” Davies said.

The dog fled the backyard last Friday while Davies and her husband were away at a fireworks show. They are sure neighborhood fireworks are to blame.

“I should have locked him in the house,” Davies said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

There was a lot of that sentiment going around local shelters, which in some cases were handling twice the number of usual stray dogs. At the Baldwin Park shelter, more than two dozen strays picked up during the weekend forced overflow into another section of the kennel. An additional 25 dogs were picked up dead--also nearly twice the normal number.

Other shelters reported being swamped, too. Wayne Besenty, Long Beach’s senior animal control officer, said holiday overcrowding in the city’s animal shelter would force workers to euthanize more dogs than normal. A shelter in Downey that was closed Monday has a backlog of 150 dogs waiting to be picked up.

“It was crazy this weekend,” said Carol Purcell, a dispatcher at the Downey shelter, which is run by the Southeast Area Animal Control Authority.

The reason for the extra business is, simply, that dogs and fireworks don’t mix. While a cat might hole up under a bed to hide from the noise, a dog’s instinct is to run. It does not matter where.

“The range of frequencies they hear is so much wider than us that it would make for a much more intense experience. . . . They don’t understand that there’s no threat,” said Alan Schulman, a veterinary surgeon at the Animal Medical Center of Southern California.

For dogs who already have flighty tendencies, the fireworks can push them over the top. “They have anxiety attacks just like people,” Schulman said. He said one couple reported their dog caused $500 to $1,000 damage to their home in a fit of panic.

Maria Acosta, accompanying her father to pick up his recovered boxer, Summer, said the family has even tried putting cotton in the dog’s ears to ease the fireworks fear. Nothing seems to work.

But specialists note that, as with edgy people, pet sedatives are available by a veterinarian’s prescription for that most traumatic day of the year.

Animal control officials also suggest keeping dogs indoors or inside the garage around the Fourth of July. Those whose dogs are missing, officials say, should keep checking at the pound.

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That’s where Roland and Ricki Albert tracked down their German shepherd, Orca, after an anxious weekend hunt through area parks and school grounds. The pooch apparently escaped from the Baldwin Park home of Roland Albert’s mother by forcing his 120-pound body against a gate and shaking it until the latch gave way. A rabies tag helped officers identify him.

“He was like in a war zone. Everywhere around him were fireworks. It literally scared the heck out of him,” said Ricki Albert.

The disappearance equally frightened Orca’s owners, visibly relieved to see him pawing good-naturedly at the pen where he was held.

“I just didn’t want him to die on the street,” said Ricki Albert. “And I didn’t want him to be put to sleep.”

Times staff writer Lisa Richardson and correspondents Richard Winton, John Cox, Deborah Belgum and Sue McAllister contributed to this story.