Blind poodle found after two days missing

Crystal acts tough curled up in one corner of her doggie bed, growling and snapping when someone gets too close to her toy shoe.

The 10-year-old tiny toy poodle — weighing about 2 pounds and blinded by cataracts — had to be tough for the two-and-a-half days she was lost, possibly clinging to a clay ledge in a drainage ditch.

The doggie drama unfolded as Marchelle Blanchard prepared to leave the Omussee Road home in Cowarts she shares with her husband, Rickey, and their two toy poodles — Crystal and 8-year-old Angel. She had let the little dogs run around the front yard before calling them back inside the house. Distracted by a phone call, Blanchard saw Angel had made it in the house and assumed Crystal had as well. So, she left. Four hours later, she got a call from her husband.

Crystal was missing.

Panicked, the Blanchards walked up and down Omussee Road looking for their pet. They checked the large ditches near their home and stopped by neighbors’ houses. No Crystal.

“It was hard to go to bed that night without her,” Marchelle Blanchard said. “We just didn’t know what we were going to do without her.”

It was raining Sunday and turned cold Monday.

Marchelle Blanchard checked with the Dothan Animal Shelter each day, put fliers out and placed a “lost pet” ad in the newspaper. Finally on Tuesday evening, a neighbor heard a yelping come from a drainage ditch that had filled with water during last week’s heavy rains. There he found the little blind poodle covered in red clay.

Disoriented, dirty, hungry and dehydrated, Crystal was reunited with her family.

“We didn’t know what we were going to do,” Marchelle Blanchard said. “It’s a miracle from God. Everybody was praying.”