As for Jerry Lewis, he can go rot in a hole.

I read Kramer’s story and looked at and petted my three wonderful dogs, dogs for whom I would do anything – ask me about the week my Bonehead spent in the veterinary ICU in 2006 a month before we lost him, or how I interrupted a Thanksgiving first date with my now-husband to go visit with my kitty Trouble at the vet emergency hospital – and I just started to cry. I do not understand how anyone could treat an animal of any kind this way, let alone a four month old trusting little puppy. That poor little guy breaks my heart.

As I take the ferry often, I would like to find out what route Jerry Lewis is on so that I can avoid sailings where he’s the captain. Because you’re right, I don’t trust him with a ferryboat full of people when he couldn’t be trusted to properly care for a helpless little pup.

I wish people understood that caring for a pup takes a lot of work and a lot of time. For example: I have a method for housetraining pups that works wonderfully. You tie a long leash around your waist and put the pup on leash, and the pup then follows you around all day, which means you are *right there* when the pup starts to squat and you can quickly scoop him up before he eliminates and take him outside to where you want him to eliminate. It has never taken me more than three weeks to housetrain a young pup this way, but it means you have to be there with the pup. ALL THE TIME. (With this method, the pup sleeps in a crate right next to the head of your bed so that you can hear him and get up if he whines to go out. I really do mean ALL the time.) If someone doesn’t have the extensive time it takes to raise and train a young puppy then both they and the puppy would be better off if they chose an older dog, one who is already housetrained and preferably one from a shelter, or didn’t get a dog at all.

I volunteer at a dog rescue and a dog i have been working with for months was just recently euthanized. It is supposedly a no-kill shelter.

She was healthy. She had behavior issues which made her harder to adopt out than many dogs, but so do many of the other dogs at this particular rescue. Her issue was dog aggression. She was temperament tested for people and passed. In fact, she was great with people and was one class short of finishing dog obedience lessons. Her teacher was expecting her to get her certificate.

When she first came to the rescue she was so scared and stressed that she got hysterical at the sight of another dog and chewed up everything in sight. She literally ate her kennel.

Over the last four months or so, she improved to the point that I could walk her on a lead past the kennels of barking dogs and she would not respond to their barking. She still loved to chew but she calmed down and no longer was distructive.

She got in to a fight with another dog, a dog who had been barking aggressively at her for days. That was the trigger.

She got put down over the weekend without my knowledge. I came in on Monday to see her and she was dead.

I taught her her name. I taught her sit, down and stay and played fetch with her. I’m not the only person who worked with her but i am the one who worked with her the most. And now she is gone.

I feel completely demoralized.

I really respect and appreciate the volunteers who keep this rescue going. Some put in as much as forty unpaid hours a week. The rescue saves hundreds of dogs every year. I do not want to make anyone there feel guilty or remorseful or stressed, but I also think they really did a bad thing by killing this dog.

I know that I should think of the edogs first. They need volunteers to come support them. They need me but I haven’t been down there — I used to go at least twice a week and usually more — since her death. My stomach knots up at the thought. I’m mad and sad, and at the same time I don’t want to talk to any of the people who made this decision because I want to support them, not burden them with my sadness and anger. After all they do so much good in spite of this one bad decision.

Thank you for giving me this space to cry.

Furrytale cannot adopt out an animal that is not healthy- with so many healthy young, cute and fluffy pups available for adoption at shelters state wide, who would give up the money to save this poor kid, who looks like hell, and need LOTS of money to make him ‘right’ again, thanks to negligent owners? Would you like to sign up to foster (AND PAY) for foster animals under Furrytale’s care? It’s not as easy as it sounds to find a quality foster family- they are few and far between. Add the cost of maintaing a dog, to a good home thats willing- that just knocked your chances straight out the window.

Kramer was let down- you are very correct as the previous poster has said. However, I am very familiar with the farm and it’s inner-workings, and I have absolutely NO hesitation that Kramer was given everything that the farm had to offer, and then some.

Jerry Lewis and his wife had never heard of The Furrytale Farm. They brought Kramer to us at the behest of coworkers who didn’t want to see the puppy end up at the humane society.

While we didn’t go off on a Mexican vacation instead of taking care of Kramer, we most certainly let him down. We didn’t require a medical exam before we took him in. We didn’t do a background check on Jerry Lewis and his wife. We didn’t make a surrender donation conditional to accepting Kramer. We didn’t have enough funds to pay for his surgery. We should have known better than to let him end up at the humane society where he was killed instead of cared for. Believe me, we do indeed feel responsible. More than you’ll ever know.

But the question here is, if you have actually been a donor to the farm, which is doubtful, since you don’t even know how to spell our name correctly, why didn’t you step up when we put out the call for help, for a foster to come forward, for funds to be donated for his care? We didn’t hear from you. By your reasoning, doesn’t that make you responsible for letting Kramer down?