EVERETT — The dog that was shot in the head with a metal-tipped arrow just before midnight Friday night "has been responding phenomenally well" and was resting in his home near Lake Stevens on Sunday night.
"He’s a miracle dog," said Dr. Nancy Hotter, the veterinarian at Diamond Veterinary Hospital in Everett who tended to 5-year-old Chase early Saturday morning and sent him home Sunday night.
Larry MacDonald was getting ready for bed late Friday when he heard Chase yelping. He opened his door to find the dog — a mix of malamute, German shepherd and pit bull — with an arrow protruding from his skull, trying to climb up the stairs to the deck.
Someone had apparently walked 50 feet up MacDonald’s driveway and shot Chase at close range. The dog apparently had allowed the assailant to approach him.
"He’s friendly to a fault, you could call it," MacDonald said Sunday afternoon as he lay on a small rug on the floor of the animal hospital, petting Chase with one hand and caressing his neck with the other.
"That’s OK, big dog," MacDonald said as Chase started whining. "I know if hurts."
A few minutes later, Chase walked a few feet unaccompanied. By the time he left the animal hospital about 7 p.m. Sunday, he had walked 20 feet before slipping on the tile.
MacDonald had spent most of Saturday and Sunday lying on the floor with his dog.
"My feeling is if he’s got me to comfort him, he won’t feel abandoned," he said.
Hotter said that, although Chase is doing far better than expected — on Saturday, Hotter feared that he wouldn’t survive or would be left paralyzed — he isn’t out of danger yet. Chase could still suffer seizures, his brain could become inflamed or infected, and the tiny piece of metal that apparently is embedded in a bone in the skull could cause problems, she said.
Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies do not have a suspect in the shooting, sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jan Jorgensen said.
Even though Chase is "an outside dog," MacDonald plans to never again let Chase go outside unaccompanied.
"It’s incomprehensible that someone did something as cruel as this," he said. "The pain he’s in — right now, he’s wishing he wasn’t alive."
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