Glebe Report

Hospital
NEWS Glebe Report February 6,1998 1 6
Glebe Questions
A safety net for pets
Some time back - indeed, before
the ice-storm - the Ottawa Citizen
carried an arresting story for
dog-lovers. The story was about
"a rash of disappearing purebred
dogs in Lanark County" and the
reporter Tom Spears made clear
his opinion that someone was
stealing the purebred bitches for
breeding purposes.
For instance, a farmer near Almonte,
Trevor Tiffany, had twin
St. Bernards, Bonnie and Clyde,
who wandered away in early December
(as they had done before).
Clyde turned up at a neighbour's
farm but his sister Bonnie completely
vanished. Some 10 other
bitches had disappeared lately
and, the previous winter, people
around Renfrew counted 25 dogs
that vanished, mostly in daylight.
It was a pretty dispiriting
story, all round. But the paragraph
that caught the attention of
my reseach assistant, Rafiki, was
the following: "Only a handful of
the (Almonte area) dogs have been
found; and all the dogs that
turned up have microchips
embedded in their ears."
Microchips in their ears. In the
11-year life of my Jack Russell
friend, this was an entirely novel
idea. He is not into the
computerized world, and
wondered if they were merely for
decoration.
So he and I went to interview
our local veterinarian, Richard
Seccombe at the Glebe Pet Service
on Bank Street. On the way, we
came upon a purebred Springer
spaniel at the Credit Union called
Winny (for Winsome Lass). We
discussed microchips with her
companion, who made Winny roll
over to show the tattoo on her
stomach. Her owner's daughter
had some country kennels, and
said thefts were common - hence
the tattoo.
For Richard Seccombe microchips
were nothing new. He
has been inserting them in cats
and dogs - not in the ears, but
behind the shoulders - for about
a dozen years. He does this for
owners at the rate of two or three
a week. He showed us the tiny
capsule, the size of a grain of rice
and containing an ID number,
which is injected just beneath the
skin, and also the scanner he
keeps that can read the number.
Then we learnt about the PetNet
procedure. A brochure informs
us that more than 150,000 Canadian
pets are microchipped and
registered with PetNet, and last
year (the brochure is undated)
more than 5,000 lost pets were
returned to their owners because
they were identified this way.
Apparently, too, the Humane
Society has for a decade insisted
that anyone taking an animal for
By
Clyde
Sanger
adoption should pay for it to be
microchipped and neutered. So
adoption costs up to $150, of
which $40 is for the microchipping.
It's for the dog's or cat's
protection, to guard against the
new owner simply dumping an
animal later.
"Tattooing, we were told by Seccombe's
assistant, Nicole, is not
as effective. She said she used to
ride an 'off-track racehorse,"
whose previous owner had gone
bankrupt. In order to keep his
horse from being repossessed (or
whatever the bailiffs do), he had
apparently burnt off the tattoo
identification that was on the
horse's inside lip. He got away
with it, but the poor horse's
mouth was a mess.
As we walked back deep in
thought across Central Park, we
came on a cheery mongrel and his
owner, who lives on Glebe Avenue
and who calls her d o g
`Scumbucket' (his politer name is
Sparky). Nosing around each
other, as dog-owners do, we asked
if Scumbucket had been microchipped.
No, though he came
from the Humane Society, as he
predated their present system.
But his owner's brother was the
Almonte neighbour at whose farm
Clyde the St. Bernard surfaced.
Finally, we phoned up Trevor
Tiffany to hear the latest on
Bonnie. Still missing, said his
son.
lcinHeink*irkkkidr*****
Months ago, I wrote that a member
of the Glebe Historical Society
was researching the origin of
street names and had no line on
why Craig Street was so called.
There was also a Craig House that
sat, acCording to John Leaning,
"on a spit of land opposite Pig
Island" when Lansdowne Park was
still a marsh (before 1868).
Mrs. Thompson, of adjacent
Findlay Street, has come up with
an answer. It was named for a
William Craig, a developer, who
built some houses there before
dying in the Spanish Flu epidemic
of 1918. He had children,
but no relatives who survived
around Ottawa, she says.
Could he also be the person who
built the Craig House, now long
gone? Or was that someone of a
previous generation? Questions
remain.
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