Most people I know are animal lovers, and the ones who are know how heart-breaking it is to lose a pet.
I’ve heard there have been some concerns about a virus known as distemper in the riverbed here in Madera. Distemper is a very contagious disease among dogs and other animals. It attacks the respiratory, gastrointestinal and nervous systems. There is a vaccine to prevent it, but if the animal does get it, and is diagnosed early enough, the animal can recover from distemper.
When I was about 10 years old, we had a dog that got distemper. His name was Skippy. We didn’t know much about the disease then, and we didn’t know how he caught it, but Skippy was an outdoor dog and roamed the neighborhood. At that time, there weren’t leash laws, and most of us didn’t even have fences around our houses. Many dogs roamed around the neighborhoods. Everybody knew which dogs belonged to which families.