our pets: PETS
Hank Williams Raises Cain
BY KATIE RODGERS
OCTOBER 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
It all began on a typical Friday
afternoon. Brandon Johnson was working
hard, transferring a buddy of his from
one worksite to another, when he
noticed something in a drain culvert. A
frightened, lonely German Shepard was
hunkered down in the darkness. Brandon
was on a tight schedule and had to keep
driving, but later that day he went back
to search for the pup.
“I looked in the same drain that I’d
first seen him in and he wasn’t there,
so I looked in a different one and found
him,” Brandon said. “I tried to get him
out with a pole with a rope and couldn’t
get him out.” Brandon called Animal
Control, and Officers Blount and Davis
responded.
“I think he growled a little, but it
wasn’t like he was going to jump out and
attack me, it was more of him just being
backed into a corner, I think,” Brandon
said of the pup’s behavior when he first
approached it.
After two hours of work, the trio
was able to free the pup from the drain
culvert. They discovered that he was
feral, with no home and most likely
nobody looking for him.
The officers took him to the
Weatherford/Parker County Animal
Shelter, where they kept him safe and
named him Hank Williams.
“We knew, of course, that nobody
would come because he was feral,”
Parker County Animal Shelter’s Kenzie
Montgomery said.
It was a sad truth, but they held Hank
90
for three business days just in case they were mistaken. As predicted,
no one came; however, Brandon and his girlfriend, Michele Vukovich,
just couldn’t stand the thought of him alone in a kennel until someone
adopted him. Brandon went back as soon as he could and adopted the
pup. He and his girlfriend renamed him Cain.
Asked what gave him the urge to go back and adopt Cain, Brandon
said aside from Michele’s unwillingness to leave him at the shelter any
longer, they wanted to add another fur member to their family.
“I used to have three dogs,” Brandon said. “We had to put one down,
I would say, about eight months ago. He was an older dog and he had
cancer.” They’d had tumors removed and the couple had done all they
Kane: Before and After