Mark Williams, Talk Show Host / Author / Public Speaker

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Sad note:  Casey passed away, quietly and with her family with her, exactly 1 year – March 23, 2012 – after I wrote and published the below.  The cause was a number of age-related issues. We were with her, and it was time. 

Ten years ago today (March 23, 2001) the sweetest soul we ever encountered happily wagged her tail and became a part of our family.

Casey

Holly had wanted a dog for some time.  She grew up with cockers and wanted to find a breeder as we grew more rooted in Sacramento.  I lobbied hard for her to at least visit a shelter and think about a rescue a dog, telling her along the way that “You’ll see it; it’ll see you and you will both instantly know.”  She heard “blah, blah, blah, blah, cocker breeder.”

One March morning I pulled a boner and ripped the front bumper off of Holly’s car while backing out of a carport and calling her on my cell at the same time.  Rather than kill me, she selected a random body shop out of the yellow pages solely on the criteria that it was nearby; neither of us knew that it was directly across the street from the Sacramento County Pound.

When we later picked up her car she figured that if she humored me by going across the street it would silence me once and for all on the pound issue, so across we went. About half way through the facility we were both emotional wrecks, literally in tears at the sight of hundreds of doomed animals, and desperately wishing we had acres of land and a car big enough to squeeze north of 400 dogs and hundreds of more cats into for the ride. That’s when we rounded a corner and came face to face with a feisty little spaniel (we would later learn, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel), looking for the entire world like Lady from Lady and the Tramp in the clutches of the evil dog catcher.  Scared and vocal she didn’t realize that the wire mesh around her would keep the neighboring and threatening pit bulls away and was putting up a valiant front.

She and Holly saw each other at the same instant and nobody was more surprised than I when they both got silent for a moment as time froze.  Then Holly exclaimed, the little dog gave one final “arf!” in the direction of her threat as if to say “back OFF!” and turned her full attention to Holly, tail wagging so hard as to threaten to wiggle her little body in half.

There were still several days left on the mandatory 7 day hold before she could be adopted so we sat on pins and needles, going to the pound for each of the next several days to visit and to reassure both ourselves and the dog.  At each visit the spaniel greeted us like we were the most welcomed sight in her life. Probably the happiest moment you could imagine was on her adoption day when they slipped the temporary leash on the ballsy little dog, who couldn’t wag her tail hard enough or look proud enough!

The first stop was for an emergency grooming.  Her silky fur was heavily matted and she was just covered with fleas and the biggest ticks we had ever seen.  Stop number two was a neighborhood veterinary clinic.  The pound had released her to us without the usual pre-release spaying because she had a serious respiratory infection that prohibited the surgery until treated, so our promise (and pre-paid spay) was her ticket out.

That first night we thought sure she was going to die.  She couldn’t breathe, her kennel cough was wicked, and even with the grooming we were still finding ticks and were doing our best to get her prescribed anti-biotics into her. After a month she was able to tolerate the spaying surgery and had the operation but was still not well.  At around 14 pounds she would not eat anything we tried.  And we tried everything, at one point pureeing raw liver to make a protein soup and buying brand dog foods that looked and smelled better than some of what was on our diets!

After a couple of more weeks of that and another round of medications things were not getting any better and the spaniel, now named “Casey” had totally stolen our hearts.  So we took her to the clinic again for a round of tests.  That night the hotline rang in the KFBK studio during a break in my show.  It was Holly.  She was in hysterics, sobbing and crying and blurting out a word here and there… like Laura Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke Show, only this call was not funny.

Casey was dying and there was nothing that could be done.

Casey’s liver was failing, big time and fast.  Holly described to me the medical terms and test terms used by the vet in his call to her and we both set about the business of what we both do best… not taking “no” for an answer. Holly at home got busy on Google, I did the same at work – multi-tasking the performing of my radio show while reading research papers way above my educational level on line at the same time (while not letting on to my listeners.)

We both rapidly educated ourselves on the possible conditions suspected and their human equivalents. Before my show ended we had located Dr. Ralph Barrett, a cutting edge researcher whose name kept coming up in connection with canine liver issues.  In what we would eventually recognize as one of a string of extraordinary strokes of luck would have it he headed a group practice not 20 miles from our home.

The Sacramento Animal Medical Group in Carmichael was staffed with heavy hitters, all sporting A-List backgrounds that included Cornell, Tufts New England and U.C. Davis, most of them had also spent time at Boston’s Angell Memorial Hospital – a Tufts facility and the gold standard of animal hospitals.  We had blundered into the veterinary version of the New York Yankees Murder’s Row right in our own back yard and needed no further introduction or motivation.

Casey was in their hands the very next morning… along with most of the money that we had been saving to put toward a down payment on our first home. Weeks of extensive (and expensive) tests followed and we learned that Casey was born with a liver that could not function beyond her 12^th – 18^th month.

It was too small and the cellular structure was disintegrating as she grew and the load on that organ increased.  There was no treatment and a transplant was not available.  Doctor Barrett and his people did have some hopeful ideas, unproven but couldn’t hurt.  Apparently just nobody had ever been willing to write the check before. Casey was put on (and remains on) a diet of prescription (very low protein) kibble, fruits and vegetables.  I have become an accomplished vegan chef (if I had her diet, I’d live to be a thousand).   To go with that there is a vitamin and herbal regimen and some new medications to deal with emerging age issues and Casey has since become known as Casey the Pound Spaniel and has gone on to meet thousands of people, in two countries, while being a spokesdog for noble causes.

To be sure there have been scares, including a bout with Bell’s Palsy.  She contracted it during an extended stay in the horrible and toxic Albany,  New York area in the winter of 2007 (we all got sick) and was left with the right side of her little face paralyzed.  She is developing heart issues and a long standing nerve problem is making her sometimes unsteady on her feet but she is still the happiest and most ready to go member of our family, always ready to drop everything to chase a squirrel back into its tree.

The Dog who was as good as dead in the spring of 2001 is now (as best as anybody can figure) around 12 years old, give or take and has taken the fullest advantage of her time, more so than many people in their entire lives!

Just one of Casey's many media credits following one of her political victories

She led the 2004 protests at the State Capitol that stopped Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from repealing an important animal protection law in a budget cut (the Hayden Law)– and made the front pages of newspapers around the world in the process, including the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle (he later sent her a box of dog biscuits.)  She was the cover girl for an issue of the United Animal Nations magazine that year too (pictured above) and on television newscasts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno and Sacramento.  She has been on several national television news broadcasts for her activism, including a feature on CNN produced and reported by CNN’s Shannon Travis as Casey was traveling between Boston and Washington, DC on the Tea Party Express last spring.  Later last year she joined her old friend Jennifer Fearing (Humane Society) and dozens of other friends new and old in an attempt to stop Sacramento County Supervisors from cutting shelter funding.

She has traveled several times to Washington, DC on political and vacation trips (Union Station and the National Mall are two of her favorite places) where she hung with  (now former) United States Senator George Allen (R-VA) and (now former) Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) during a “Hold their feet to the Fire” trip. She met Sarah Palin in Searchlight, Nevada and again in Boston, where she appeared on stage with Palin during a Tea Party on Boston Common.  Miss. California – Carrie Prejean posed for a whole roll of pictures with Casey and she counts among her friends “Aunt” Melanie Morgan, Dennis and Sue Prager, Congressman Tom McClintock and several Hollywood stars she has met along the way in her 3 appearances as official mascot of the annual Move America Forward Troopathon to raise money to buy and ship comfort items for America’s fighting men and women around the world.

Her favorite cities include:  San Francisco, San Diego, Boston and Reno… and of course Sacramento where she can be found attending political and social events or just patrolling Squirrel (Capitol) Park and her regular walks in Goose (McKinley) Park.  In 2007 while visiting the rural Adirondack village of Queensbury, New York she actually caught a full grown wild turkey!  Or it caught her, or they caught each other when Casey noticed movement in a bush while outside on an off leash walk.

The ensuing scene was like a Warner Brothers cartoon with first a wing, then a spaniel tail, then a turkey head, then a spaniel head all popping out of the bush in turn, with the turkey finally making a break for it with a little spaniel on its back like an Arab kid in an ostrich race.  It all took less than a minute but I thought sure that one of them was going to the vet that day; I just wasn’t sure which one. Casey obeyed the “stop” command and was so bursting with pride that she nearly spun herself dizzy, arfing the whole time as she led me back to the front door of Holly’s sister’s house so that she could run in and tell mom all about this amazing adventure!

At last count Casey has visited around a dozen US states and the Mexican States of Colima and Jalisco, where she was treated like a queen.  Over her lifetime she has logged well north of 100,000 air miles, much of it cross country and back or getaways to San Diego.