A grieving woman has spoken out and demanded answers after her beloved dog died shortly after a visit to the groomer.
As 37-year-old Lisa O’Neill revealed, she lost 9-month-old Harry the cockapoo after the pooch suffered intestine complications following a trip to an award-winning grooming salon in Scotland.
According to the dog lover, who bought Harry for $3,000 less than a year ago, she first took her pet to a grooming salon back in February. At the time, Harry was washed and dried without problems and the pair returned home happy and good-smelling.
Months later, however, things didn’t go as planned as O’Neill once again took Harry to the same groomer.
“In May, it was the same scenario – a girl came and took him off me outside. About an hour later, I got a phone call saying Harry had collapsed while being dried,” the dog lover explained.
“At this point, I still had no idea about a drying cage. It wasn’t until she told the vet what had happened they came back to me saying ‘he had heatstroke and that these drying boxes are death traps’.
“It turns out, he had been put in a heated drying box and the timer was set for 30 minutes. Being an excitable puppy, he didn’t like being locked in anywhere so being locked in a drying box he would have jumped about the whole time.”
Following a postmortem, it was determined that the pup died from a collapsed intestine rather than heatstroke. As O’Neill believes, however, the fact that Harry was locked in the small drying cage for half an hour must have contributed to his death.
“I had to go and sit with him while they put him to sleep. He had suffered horrendously before he was put to sleep. He had intussusception due to the stress and trauma of being locked in the box,” she insisted.
“The specialist said everything he’d suffered from had caused an intussusception – where intestines go into themselves. But his blood wouldn’t clot so they couldn’t cut him open – he would have just bled out on the table.
“I can discuss it now without breaking down but it’s taken a while for that to happen. A dog is a member of the family. He definitely suffered tremendously, he was locked in a box.
“Harry if you put him in a crate, he would jump about, he didn’t want to be locked in, so to be locked in a heated box for that length of time, he would have been going crazy.”
While O’Neill didn’t name the grooming salon in question, she has since the tragedy called for better regulation of dog groomers.
“I got in touch with the SSPCA at the time and the inspector who had went out to investigate the groomer hadn’t even heard dryer boxes,” the woman revealed.
“Because there are no laws with groomers, they don’t need to tell you about it.”
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