Animals
Owner Says To Vet, ‘Kill My Dog.’ Vet Agrees, But Seconds Later…
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Puppy mills are large-scale commercial dog breeding facilities where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs.
No thought is given to the fact that dogs are social creatures that require daily care besides food, water and shelter.
These filthy mills usually house dogs in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions without adequate veterinary care, food, water and little to no socialization.
Most veterinarians suggest breeding a female dog no more often than 24 months in most cases.
But, in order to maximize profits, female dogs in puppy mills are bred at every opportunity (usually twice a year) with little-to-no recovery time between litters.
The life of a puppy mill breeding dog is a indeed a very sad one, and one Pennsylvania vet knows this better than anyone.
He sees the end results more often than people in other areas because so many Amish and Mennonite farmers near him own puppy mills.
One dog that stands out in his memory is a boxer named Tracy. When Tracy’s owner brought her into his clinic, she was emaciated, sick and extremely weak.
Tracy just barely clung to life — and whenever she tried to walk, she nearly fell over.
But she wasn’t brought to the clinic because she was so sick and pitiful. No, the owner wanted to find out why she’d stopped getting pregnant!
He didn’t care that she was miserable. He only cared that she didn’t get pregnant after she was bred, and therefore wouldn’t be bringing in any money.
“He asked the vet if they could fix her up enough to be bred again, and if they couldn’t, the only thing he’d pay for was to have her euthanized,” Dawn Karam, president of Adopt A Boxer Rescue, told The Dodo.
“Greed is an awful thing and this is all it was.”
The cold-hearted owner wouldn’t pay for anything besides euthanization and that was the bottom line.
But the vet knew Tracy needed more help so after the owner left (thinking the dog would be put down), the vet called Adopt a Boxer, which offered to cover any treatment costs.
“Her chance of living seemed very grim,” Karam said.
“She wouldn’t eat, and all of her symptoms seemed to point to some type of neurological ailment, like a brain tumor, but the tests found nothing.
The day before Christmas Eve, we knew we had to bring her to the only other people who could give her more help.”
After more tests, everyone realized the startling truth:
Tracy was merely suffering from an acute case of starvation!
“Every bit of her imbalance, every bit of her condition was because she was locked in a cage on that mill and deprived of the simplest thing that any pet needs,” Karam said.
“She was only 37 pounds — a female boxer is supposed to be at least 20 pounds more than that.”
So the vets hooked up Tracy to a feeding tube and after four days, she’d improved enough to move her to a loving foster home.
There, Karam says she is “comfortable, eating well, and has already gained back 10 pounds.”
Furthermore, Tracy is getting the socialization she so desperately lacked when in the hands of the puppy mill owner.
This is the very definition of a difficult rescue but it has all worked out in the end…thanks to a vet who simply refused to give up on an abused dog.
These are the heroes all animal lovers should applaud!
As for those awful puppy mills, which continue to plague the pet industry, please consider donating to investigations that help shut them down.
Source: The Dodo
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