1207Singapore Mongrel
Cross-bred dog with infected bite wounds, pet health and welfare educational for animal
lovers, excerpts from The
Glamorous Vets, Singapore, sponsored by AsiaHomes Internet.
Was the dog shot?
 "A big fluctuating mass below the neck to the back of the
chin." Mr Thulaisimal said as he transported the cross-bred dog to the clinic in his
pick up. A mass as big as a cupped hand of an adult person. What could
it be?
"I am the security guard of the
factory in the Tampines industrial Park. The dog catchers might have shot him as
they were in the area shooting at stray dogs a few days ago. It was too late for me to
warn him off as I did not see the government Land Rover coming" Mr Thulaisimal
explained apologetically to me. As if he was to be blamed for not being on the
lookout for the nemesis of the stray dogs!
 "Could this male dog be mauled in a dog fight
and shot by the shot gun pellets?" I asked the kind security guard with a pot belly
and white beard.
The dog's jugular vein had ruptured, blood haemorrhaged out and led to this large neck
swelling. He could have scratched at the swelling to relieve himself of the
pain and itch. The scratch wound could be a laceration bite wound. There were
holes in the skin and this could be bite wounds."
 "I don't know." the guard said.
The dog had a painful neck swelling painful with a hard fibrous capsule under the skin.
He had survived eight years in the concrete jungle and now he was in distress and
had turned to the guard for help.
I tranquilised him with an injection in his back muscle.
Nurse Ann clipped the hair around the neck swelling, washed it with antiseptic solution
for me to operate. I used a scalpel to make a one-inch incision into the skin and
the fibrous tissue of the swelling. No liquid blood or pus came out freely. He was
not fully knocked out and could feel the pain.
I had to inject a small dose of the pentobarbiturate anaesthetic into his vein to fully
anaesthesize him to drain his infected swelling. I used a syringe and needle to aspirate
around 400 ml of a jelly-like blood from a thick wall encapsulating the bleeding.
A portion of the jugular vein must have been ruptured and the bleeding was finally stopped
by the back pressure of the large amount of blood trapped under the skin in the neck area.
This dog would have died if the jugular vein had burst outside the neck skin.
Could this be a case of a gun wound? The shot gun pellets usually scattered in a wide area
and this dog could have received one of the pellets lodged inside its jugular vein
or the surrounding as he faced the shooters in defiance instead of running away like his
comrades in the streets when they see the dog shooters.
The wound must have been at least seven days old and the dog would have died if not for
the intervention of the kind security guard.
Note: In late 1990s, the government had apparently stopped shooting stray dogs with
shot guns. Dog shooters were part and parcel of dog lovers' growing up life in the
1970s.
The dog lovers would be on the lookout for the bluish grey Land Rover of the Primary
Production Department, now called the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority and would
warn the stray dogs off so that they could live a free life.
The stray dog would usually be cornered and given a blast of the shot gun at the killing
range of around fifty feet. It was terribly traumatic for dog lovers especially the
distraught younger children to see dogs shot, the bleeding, the screams and the bleeding.
It was a sight hard to describe but it would be indelibly and forever etched into the
memories when seen by a dog lover.
In 2001, there are very few stray dogs left in Singapore owing to the successful
eradication policy.
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