Pete's New Dog Josie

Pete was hunting way up in Northern MN, I forget where, when he went to an animal shelter on a whim. At the shelter was this yellow lab that the shelter workers were very high on. The dog was picked up as a stray and had been in the shelter for about a month. Pete checked the dog out and decided to adopt it. The shelter named the dog Joseie and it seemed to know it's name, so Pete didn't rename it. Josie is house trained and was obviously a house dog. The vet thinks it's about 18 months old. It has a great temperament and gets along just fine with our dogs and cat. Pete's old dog Sandy isn't exactly in love with Josie but she seems to be getting more tolerant.

We had a scare with Josie this week when she found and bit into a albuterol inhaler of mine that had been lost. She got a pretty good overdose. Pete took her to the emergency vet in Little Falls and they wanted to send her on to St. Cloud where it would be over $1,000 to treat her. Pete wasn't having that so he got a little advice and brought her back here after picking up some potassium pills at Wall Mart. The main danger with an albuterol overdose is cardiac arrest because the drug really makes the heart rate accelerate for a prolonged period of time. From the vet along with online research we found out to give her the potassium and a beta-blocker, which I happen to have because of my heart condition. All we could do was pray, wait, and hope. Thankfully, she was pretty much back to normal in 24 hours.


Update 1/31/11: Josie turned out to be gun shy and would run away every time Pete shot at something. One of the times it ran away it went to a farmer who liked Josie so much they offered to keep her seeing as how it just wasn't going to work out for Josie to be a hunting dog.