Luck gives abused dog second chance at life

Remember Chance?

Chance was a year-old black Labrador who pawed at readers’ hearts in March after neighbors discovered the pup buried beneath a concrete stair landing of a Spokane Valley apartment.

He was howling like a child in a well. Would-be rescuers didn’t know right away where Chance’s cries were coming from, but once they noticed several feet of patted-down dirt near the concrete’s edge and a shovel nearby, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

The ordeal played out in the 5000 block of North Evergreen Avenue in Trentwood. Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service investigated, but the dog’s owner denied knowledge of the burial. The owner disclosed the dog’s original name, “Stinky,” but little else. The media swooped in to record the public outrage and called it a wrap.

This is what happened next:

No one was ever charged with entombing Chance like some pharaoh’s hound beneath the stairs. His rescuers blamed the dog’s owner, who neighbors believed had to have known something, or at least heard Chance howling and chose to ignore it. But finger-pointing wasn’t enough.

“No one actually witnessed them do it,” said Patricia Simonet, a program coordinator for SCRAPS. “It was just a lot of circumstantial evidence.”

Simonet would have liked charges to have been filed, if proof allowed it. SCRAPS investigated 184 cases of cruelty, abuse or neglect to animals last year, everything from dogs left outside on a cold day with only a bowl of frozen water, to cats targeted by children.

Chance’s case was bizarre. Even now, when the dog’s story comes up there’s an air of disbelief that someone would bury a dog alive. Often suggested is that Chance was buried to teach him a lesson, but what’s a dog to learn from live burial? You could just as soon duct-tape its paws to the steering wheel of a truck until it learned how to drive.

“Poor little guy. I felt so sorry for him,” said Christine Humber.

Humber rescued Chance from the shelter, where, had no one stepped up to claim him, Chance’s unearthing would have been for naught. The Hayden woman spotted the Labrador on the Internet days after it arrived at SCRAPS. She read its story and decided the animal would be hers if it was still at the shelter when she got off work.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to get him,’ ” Humber said. “He wasn’t fixed. He seemed skinny. I think he’s put on 10 pounds since then. He was about a year old. He definitely has Lab in him, but he’s got a lot of pepper under his chin,” a sure sign of something else.

His odor matched the name on his cage, “Stinky,” when Humber picked up the dog, but a little shampoo cured that. She was at the Liberty Lake animal clinic a couple days later getting her new dog his shots when she picked Chance’s new name from a bulletin board blanketed with dog pictures.

Chance seemed like a good name for a dog with some luck on its side, though it also could have referred to Humber’s risk in taking in the dog.

As it turned out, Chance wasn’t a dog suited for just anybody. Left in the yard alone, he moves earth like a steam shovel. This is something Humber would have worked to curtail, had her daughter Brittany Fincher not developed such a tight bond with the dog.

Chance now lives with Fincher in Athol. Fincher, 20, knows the dog is a work in progress. When they first met, Chance was pretty untrusting of men, but he’s warmed to Fincher’s boyfriend. He may eventually warm to life above ground.

“He dug himself under the house a while ago,” Fincher said. “He’s slowed down a little bit, I think because the ground is frozen.”