by Ahoo Favorov
Ten months ago, I was pregnant, sitting in Atlanta, waiting for the arrival of our son, when I heard the news that our dog, Sadie, whom we had left behind in the Ukraine because of a no-fly restriction in summer months, was gone. She had been let off her leash and after thirty minutes was nowhere to be found. The Ukraine, as most former Soviet republics, can be a brutal place for dogs. An estimated 30,000 stray dogs roam the streets of Kiev alone. They are mangy, dirty, wild and prone to fight. If a domesticated dog such as our Sadie isn’t mauled by a wild pack, she may die at the cruel hands of humans, who leave poisonous shards of bone and meat in parks where hungry dogs eat them and proceed to die within hours. Because of a 2007 four-year initiative to combat the dog problem, a misappropriation of funds, and now a need to explain why the dogs still roam wild, the poison in parks was a desperate and cruel group of people’s next best solution. In the past two months I’ve learned of seven domestic dogs that have died from 
eating the bone shards. Needless to say there wasn’t much hope for our lost dog.
Regardless, my American tendencies wouldn’t allow me to do nothing. So I had friends post signs all over the city, visit shelters and vets and just walk around talking to people. I also found two very seldom used websites for lost and found animals that I posted a picture and description of Sadie in Russian.
Nine months passed.
A woman calls my husband and tells him she thinks she has our dog. He visits the dog in question at a veterinary clinic a few blocks from where Sadie was lost. The poor dog is about fifty pounds overweight and cannot walk because of what looks like badly healed broken bones. She doesn’t recognize us at all and is fearful of everything. It is a heartbreaking reunion. I am not even certain it is my dog, she is so changed. She finds a corner in our kitchen and stays there, too afraid to go anywhere outside of the cold kitchen tile.
The woman who contacted my husband came to us the next day and told us what she knew about our dog. After being hit by a car Sadie was brought into the clinic, where she was caged and kept. She couldn’t walk for over a month because of broken bones and because of her confinement her muscles eventually atrophied, hence the horrible limp and severe obesity. The woman, who it turns out is a volunteer at the clinic, was messing around on one of the websites that I posted Sadie’s picture on and somehow made the connection. After returning to the site myself I found my posting was still one of the most current ones, even though it was made in June 2010. Because of the seldom use of the site she found our posting immediately. We gave a month’s salary reward money to this woman and instead of using it for herself she emailed to say she used it to save the life of another dog in need of a surgery.
Sadie’s return to us is a miracle. She was meant to be in our family. Since that first night after her return to us she has come a long way. She has dropped about fifteen pounds and is walking better. She wags her tail and moves around the house more. She has a dog walker who is helping to bring her back to the mentality of a family dog, rather than a shelter dog, which is who she has become. The most amazing part of all this is that with all the hardship she suffered, she became even kinder and gentler than before.
So, for all the bad that is done to animals here, there are rare and amazing people saving dog’s lives one at a time, and reuniting them with their ever grateful families.
