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HELP NEEDED URGENTLY - HAVE YOU GOT SPACE FOR A BIG DOG?
(Update March 12th 2005, Babis has been found a home)
 Lakithra has a couple of well known “village dogs” - i.e. everyone in the village knows them and feeds them but they don’t belong to anyone in particular. One of them is Babis, a Golden Labrador colour, about 25 kilos in weight and a couple of years old. He’s gentle, friendly and loves human company.
On Tuesday evening Adele arrived at my house asking for help because Babis had been found injured on the wasteland beside the Obelisk Grill and mini-market. He was covered in dried blood down his face, his chest and right to the tips of his toes. His throat was gaping open and opinions varied from a car accident to a dogfight.
Puppies were bundled onto the balcony for the night and we raced back to Lakithra to find a couple of the locals had taken some T-shirts and tried to wrap them around his neck to stop the blood flow and close the wound.
At the vet’s, we found it was more serious than we’d imagined. There was evidence of gun pellet shots to his face, and, once he was under anaesthetic, we found not one, but two knife cuts across his throat. The first one hadn’t gone deep enough to do any real damage, so whoever it was had taken a second slash and nearly succeeded in killing him. It needed 24 stitches on the epidermis, and about 5 in the dermis.
Babis came home with me for the night- complete with drip. The next day we were supposed to start antibiotics and painkiller but he had a massive haematoma in his mouth. He wasn’t drinking anything and it was impossible to get tablets down his throat. So, we went back to the vet for some jabs and another prescription in injection form.
All he did was sleep from Tuesday until Wednesday evening. Then he got up to have his first drink of water. Thursday morning he started eating – not a pretty sight considering the size of the haematoma and his inability to eat properly! He was moved from my house to a pen at Villa Maura.
 Now, a week later, he’s on the mend. But he doesn’t like being bandaged up to protect the stitches, and he likes being kept in a pen even less. So much so that he climbed the fence on Friday morning and disappeared for nearly 30 hours. Adel and her husband were out searching for hours, but when Mark got home from work on Saturday afternoon, he found Babis collapsed outside their garden gate. He was given his painkillers and antibiotic and taken back to Svoronata. Mark made the pen escape proof and Babis is now miserable, but safe. He has removed every bandage that has been put on and, on Sunday, removed all the stitches in the epidermis.
I took him back the vet on Monday to see what we could do about closing the wound again and the vet thinks it’s clean and healthy in colour, so we’re leaving it open. He thinks it’ll take about 3-4 weeks to heal itself, as long as we can stop Babis from scratching.
If we put Babis back into the area he’s familiar and at home in, there’s every chance the man who tried to kill him will have another try. He needs a home somewhere safe.
March 12th 2005. We are very pleased to report that Babis has now been adopted by a Lady in Svoronata, and can look forward to a safe and happy life in a loving home.
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