First, let me explain that I am not one of those people. You know, the ones who can nonchalantly walk/drive by a loose dog in the street or on the side of the road and carry on as if nothing was the matter.

I have to stop. I am compelled to stop. And while I like to joke that I am always doing this to try to up my “canine Karma” in the event that Greta ever slips away from me, that’s really not true, because I was doing this long before I ever considered having a dog.

Back to the finding of dogs, which usually happens a couple of times a year (I lost count at 10 dogs since we’ve lived here). This past weekend, it happened again.

On Saturday, we decided to go on a family walk, which we hardly ever do. Greta was leashed up and very excited to be with both “mommy” and “daddy”, and off we went.

About two blocks away, we saw a rottweiler running in the street. It saw us and turned and ran the other way, so we followed it. It ran up to a house, and Mike was 99 percent sure it lived there.

The dog was very sweet and submissive, so I was able to see that it had a license but no address/phone number tag, so we had no way of contacting the owner.

Of course, no one was home, and neither were the neighbors on either side. For some reason, the house also had no backyard access from the front, so we could neither get the dog back in the yard, nor figure out how it got out to begin with. (It was grossly overweight, so there was no under/over the fence action, to be sure.)

The people who lived there often had the rottweiler tethered to a tree in front of the house, so we took that tether and tied the dog to the front door, hoping that the owners would be back momentarily and all would be fine. I filled the dog’s water dish, and we set off.

On our way home about an hour later, we went back by the house, and the dog was still there. We made sure it had enough water and was as comfortable as possible, and we came home and called Sacramento Animal Control to report the incident.

Because the dog had a license, they were able to contact the owner and resolve the problem. Thankfully, the dog was o.k. and didn’t get hurt or hit by a car in the meantime.

Then, on Sunday morning on our way out on some errands, we saw a dachshund running in the street (a very busy street by our house) and no one was around. We stopped, and the little thing had a collar on, but no tags of any kind (not very helpful when trying to reunite dog and owner).

We brought it home and got a leash and I walked it all around the area where we found it, in the hopes that it would either know its way home or its owner would come out looking for it.

Neither happened, so again I called Animal Control.

An Animal Control Officer came out to get the dog, and it just so happened to be the same guy I talked to the day before about the rottweiler.

He thanked me for helping them out (both the dogs and Animal Control), and then he said:

“You know, you’re doing the right thing. Most people think it’s better to leave the dog and let it find its way home, but they almost never do and they just end up hurt or dead. It’s much better to give them a chance to be reunited or adopted by someone else, or at least put down humanely instead of being hit by a car.”

I hugged the man. And then I went inside and showered Greta with kisses.

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