Found in 'horrible condition,' Spudley the dog's story has a happy ending

CLIFFORD – When Sean LeMay went to check on his two golden retrievers one morning, he was surprised to find they weren’t alone in the kennel behind his country house, not far from Clifford.

He didn’t know what he was looking at right away but it turned out to be a dog, some kind of doodle breed now known as Spudley, in terrible shape who had wandered in there sometime overnight on Feb. 7. 

The dog’s fur was severely matted all over.

“Like for a fleeting moment, I’m thinking there’s crazy genetic experiments going on in the barns around here … then you realize obviously it’s a dog,” LeMay said. “Is it afraid? Is it aggressive? Has it been living on its own in the wild for years by the look of it and you don’t know if it is hurt.”

He noticed his dogs didn’t really react to Spudley and figured he wasn’t a danger to anyone. After bringing the dog some food and reassuring the dog to the point where he could pet it, LeMay considered calling animal services but decided to go a different route. 

“It didn’t have tags on it so nobody was going to identify it,” LeMay said, fearing the dog may be put down. “I didn’t want to get him killed.”

LeMay posted a photo on his business’ page and message asking for help for the dog and was flooded with phone calls from people looking to help.

“I was inundated, I bet you there were five or six rescues calling me … five or six groomers volunteering their services and all kinds of other people,” LeMay said. 

One of these people was Shelley Campbell from Palmerston whose daughter Tailor Farrell is a volunteer director with Halfway Home K9 Rescue from Cambridge

Farrell, now based in Fredericton, coordinated efforts to get Spudley help from the Maritimes.

Campbell and her son ended up being the ones to pick him up and take him on his “freedom ride” to a safer place.

Campbell was heartbroken by the dog’s appearance.

“He was in horrible condition, like I‘ve seen that stuff before, but the mats on him were just unreal,” Campbell said. “Even the odour from him, you just can’t even begin to imagine that somebody could leave the dog in that condition.”

She could tell, however, that this dog was in good spirits and wanted to make contact with her.

Campbell left Spudley with other volunteers in Arthur who took him to a vet in Fergus the next day. 

“He actually had about five pounds of hair removed from him when they did the shaving at the vet and he was severely underfed, he is only about 32 pounds,” Farrell said. “A dog his size should be anywhere from 45 to 50 pounds. So he is very skinny.”

The dog also had walking dandruff, a highly contagious mite, but was otherwise mostly healthy. 

It was determined Spudley was somewhere around one year old. He is now with a foster family in the Woodstock area where he is being treated for his mites.

Where exactly this dog came from remains a mystery but Farrell said there are a number of breeders in the area but puppy adoption has declined from its peak in COVID. Therefore, she speculated he may have either been released or escaped from one of these operations. 

Either way, Farrell believed the dog was saved from coyotes often seen by LeMay in his area by taking shelter at his kennel.

LeMay noted the huge response to his social media post, about 25,000 views, speaks volumes about the nature of humanity. 

“I’m not Taylor Swift, I don’t get a million views every time we post something about pizza and with Clifford (having) a thousand people and you get 25,000 views, that’s because it was shared all over the place,” LeMay said. “Is the nature of man good or is it not good? To me this is a testament to the fact that there’s goodness in Canadians that there’s this many people concerned about the wellbeing of an animal.”