When Carole Ritchie of Riverview, N.B.’s granddaughter travelled to Da Nang, Vietnam last fall to do some volunteer work, she worried she might never come home.
“I was more concerned with her falling in love with a man or a partner and not an animal,” said Ritchie.
But it turned out that her granddaughter, Sarah MacLeod, also of Riverview, fell in puppy love.
While volunteering at an animal shelter that caters to animals with special needs called Paws for Compassion in central Vietnam, MacLeod, who has a degree in kinesiology, rather unexpectedly fell in love with a rescue pup named Captain, which she is now trying to get back home to Canada.
“When I first met him he wasn’t the dog that was super energetic and happy, he was kind of in the corner, old, grumpy shelter dog,” said MacLeod.
After being struck by a car and abandoned by his owner, the street dog was rescued by the shelter where MacLeod volunteered for three months last fall. Captain, whose hind end was paralyzed, had to have a leg amputated and one eye removed, along with his teeth.
Having worked to help rehabilitate humans with disabilities back home in Canada, MacLeod fostered Captain in her apartment and lovingly nursed him back to good health.
She fell madly in love.
“He has such a new love for life that I want to be able to let him live out the rest of his life being that happy,” she said.
Captain now uses a wheelchair to get around and getting him back home to New Brunswick, she says, will offer the eight-year-old pup a more comfortable life.
But it won’t be easy.
“She is going to have to jump through some hoops to get him home,” said her grandmother, also an animal lover.
According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, MacLeod will have to prove that she has formally adopted Captain and will have to meet all of the medical and documentation requirements for Captain to become a Canadian K-9.
MacLeod said her visa ran out in Vietnam so she is currently in the Philippines but plans to return to Da Nang in March to try and get everything in order to fly Captain to Canada.
“It costs an extra $400 per flight and if I can go back to New Brunswick, that is three flights,” she said.
She’s now trying to raise the money for the journey.
Meanwhile, Captain is temporarily back at the shelter ahead of what Macleod hopes will be a happy reunion in the spring with the boy she met and fell in love with abroad and hopes to spend the rest of his life with.
“I think everyone is going to love him in Canada.”