FREDDIE

Rescued from a puppy farm/hoarding situation in the British Columbia interior in August 2010, at age one or two, Freddie, a Pomeranian cross, was transported to Vancouver Island as part of the BCSPCA's Ride For Life program, which moved animals rescued from bad situations to other parts of the province to get them away from the place of rescue and to broaden their chances for adoption.

Biographer Grant Hayter-Menzies and his husband met Freddie at the BSCPA shelter in Victoria, BC on 11 September 2010. He’d clearly not been well-fed and had not been socialized, as is often the case with hoarding victims. When they took him outside the shelter on a leash, Freddie reacted to wind ruffling his dark coat, to birds flying overhead, as if he’d never seen them before. When they took him home, he sat in a corner of the kitchen and shook from fear.

Freddie gradually began to come out of his shell it would take till the end of his life for them to help him not be afraid of almost everything. They asked an animal behavioral therapist to visit and meet Freddie. She determined he was reacting to Grant’s anger towards the people who did this to Freddie and his deep sadness about what had happened to make him so afraid. She counseled them to remember dogs live in the moment, and to try to do the same.

Her advice was to feed Freddie by hand for as long as it took to build trust between them. Grant did this, sitting on the kitchen floor, for some three months. One night he was shelving books upstairs. Freddie came up the stairs, down the hall, and stopped where he sat. He then lay down beside him and lay his head on his leg. Grant knew then that everything was OK.

Grant had made a name for himself as biographer of extraordinary but unsung women, traveling the world to research and to do book talks and signings. But as he observed Freddie’s astonishing and moving efforts to trust, when he had been given no reason to trust humans, and to love, when he had never been loved, he was inspired to read about famous animals of the past who had distinguished themselves in various situations, often in war, where they too often gave their last full measure of devotion for conflicts no animal ever caused. That was the beginning of Grant’s switch from writing about human lives to exploring and celebrating the lives of extraordinary animals, he understood his opportunity and his duty to give voice to the voiceless.

From these books, which were intended to raise awareness of the need to cherish and honour animals, whether personal companions or animals in service to human needs, Grant donated a portion of his royalties, as a way of giving back to the charities supporting animal welfare and to be thankful for the charity that rescued Freddie and allowed him and his husband to include him in their lives.

Over the years, Freddie raised funds and awareness for rescued animals himself, being voted three times for placement in the BCSPCA calendar (votes were attached to cash donations, to benefit the charity), and participated in other fundraising and awareness raising efforts. He helped unbox author’s copies of eight of Grant’s books, almost half of these biographies of animals, including the very last time he helped, a few days before his passing in October 2021, when copies of the biography of Muggins, the famed fundraising Pomeranian of WWI Victoria, BC. Freddie, who was Muggins’s size, had helped Grant in my on-foot research, tracing the routes through the city that Muggins had taken during his collection of donations.

As recorded in Grant’s 2023 memoir, Freddie: The Rescue Dog Who Rescued Me, in summer 2020 Freddie was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma, an aggressive vascular cancer that normally offers only a few weeks or a few months of survival. Though he was about 13 years old and had a serious heart murmur, he survived surgery and three months of chemotherapy and was considered a miracle by his oncologist when he was still with us over a year later. Unfortunately, not long before he passed away, Freddie was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was strong enough to take a second round of chemotherapy, but in the end his weakened heart gave out in 25 October 2021 and he passed in his dads arms.