We had hoped Claude would live long enough to meet this little girl, but he died two days before Blanca arrived at the ranch. And if you’re doing a double-take, it’s because she’s a Great Dane puppy, too, who looks uncannily like him. She’s also the exact same age — 4 months — that Claude was when he came to us. Like Claude, she was born with microphthalmia, which means her eyeballs are malformed and not functional. She’s completely blind in her left eye (there really isn’t anything there) but she can see — we think — shapes and shadows from her shrunken right eye. She’s also completely deaf.
When Blanca’s owner in Guadalajara, Mexico, asked us a few weeks ago if we could take Blanca, we knew that Claude wouldn’t have much longer to live. So we thought it would be a wonderful way to honor him by letting another blind Great Dane puppy take his place. We just wanted him to still be with us when she arrived, but that was not to be.
Blanca was one of 18 puppies born on April 1st to a Great Dane named Manta. Manta’s owner is Rosanna M., an American citizen living in Guadalajara. Rosanna had hoped to keep the beautiful white puppy she named Luna, but finally concluded that she didn’t have the right environment to care for a puppy with these kinds of disabilities. In Guadalajara, Rosanna’s options were limited. Even the veterinary ophthalmologist she took the puppy to see had said Rosanna should put the dog down.
Rosanna and I spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to figure out how to fly the puppy out of Mexico and up to Montana. It’s not easy! Most of the U.S. airlines flying out of Guadalajara or nearby Puerto Vallarta either wouldn’t transport animals from Mexico, or they stopped first in places like Los Angeles, meaning you have to clear customs, then re-book the animal for the onward journey. Finally an Alaska Airlines employee told me that Aeromexico had a flight from Guadalajara to Seattle and would transport animals.
So Rosanna called Aeromexico, booked a ticket for herself and the baby Dane, and on Saturday a week ago they flew to Seattle. On Sunday, Rosanna drove over to our old neighborhood in Bellevue to drop the puppy off with a wonderful friend of ours, Bindy O., who does pet sitting and also works in our former veterinary clinic. Bindy took great care of this little girl for us all of last week. Then yesterday, another set of Seattle friends and supporters of the sanctuary, Jan R. and Wayne S., brought her out to Montana for us.
(And that’s not all they brought out. Jan and Wayne stopped in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to pick up two more animals for us who came from the Panhandle Animal Shelter in Sandpoint. But I’m saving those two for tomorrow’s blog post!)
Although we liked the name ‘Luna,’ we already have an animal with the same name … our blind mare Luna from Colorado … so we decided to call this adorable puppy Blanca. Because she’s deaf, it doesn’t really matter to her, but it will keep us from getting confused!
I will admit that when I saw Blanca for the first time yesterday, I teared up. She looks so much like Claude when he was that age that you could mistake them for twins. But this is how the ‘circle of life’ goes for us: We lose one young life on Thursday, and on Saturday another young life arrives.
(Click on photos for larger image.)
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