A 10-month-old dog named Duke had been chained to an old truck and left to die after his owner didn’t want him anymore.
A 10-month-old dog named Duke had been chained to an old truck and left to die after his owner didn’t want him anymore.
After Duke got sick, his owner had started a rumor that reason the dog would cough all the time is because he was ‘diseased’ and ‘untouchable’.
Thankfully a woman informed the Rudozem Street Dog Rescue and they came out to save the dog’s life.
It turns out that the dog had been chained to the truck for 10 days and that the previous owner had broken his feet. He was covered in his own feces, had fleas all over his body, and was extremely malnourished.
“It was a real shock when the vet said this was trauma to his feet,” Rowles tells The Dodo. “They were obviously broken. His feet were shattered. The ligaments in his feet were nonexistent. Bones were just floating about in his feet.”
When the group’s cofounder Tony Rowles arrived, he couldn’t believe that someone could treat any animal this way: “He was very scared,” Rowles says. “There was a stench of ammonia. He couldn’t move anywhere. It was totally overwhelming.”
Instead of taking Duke to the packed shelter, Tony took him home and introduced him to his other pets.
“He was OK when I approached him initially. But you could see that fear in the way he moved and the way he backed away for those first few weeks,” Rowles says. “He really made an attachment with my wife Diane. He just loved Diane.”
After getting surgery to fix his feet and know what love feels like, the puppy was adopted by the kindest woman in England.
It’s stories like this that make me appreciate all the rescue organizations and the help they provide to animals in need.