I am on vacation from rescue this week (or I am supposed to be). Anyway one of my good shelters CALLED me instead of emailing me today. They told me they had a little male boston that had been picked up as a stray that needed to be picked up and go to rescue because he had a prolapsed rectum and the shelter environment was not a good place for him.

So I got a volunteer to pick him up fromt he shelter and meet me. Lisa called after she picked him up and told me he needed to get to the vet immediately. Well... not so easy since my vet was on vacation and I called my backup vet and he was closed today for the holiday. So I remembered another vet that a friend of mine who rescues bostons uses in the general vicinity of where I was meeting Lisa and called them. They said they could work me in, but the vet had an errand to do and would be gone a short time and I Told them I didn't mind waiting. I called Lisa and asked her to meet me there.

When Lisa brought the little boy in, I was in love. He had the sweetest little face. You could tell he didnt' feel good, but he gave stinky breathed kisses and layed in our laps (most unusual for bouncing off the walls boston puppies). He was probably 3-5 months old. Beautiful, beautiful boy. But.... he did have a major prolapsed rectum with about 3 inches or more hanging out. AND it had cracks in it and was very dark colored. It was oozing blood etc, Very disgusting and had a horrible smell.

The vet took a look at it and immediately said it has already changed colors to dark and died and she could not fix it. That she would recommend euthanizing him to spare him any more pain. She said IF I wanted to that I could go to a surgeon and try to have the bowel resected, but that would put the puppy through a lot more pain and she would be surprised if he lived 2 weeks because of the shape it was already in and he would preobably die of "I can't remember what she called it, but I am thinking sepsis or septosemia or something along those lines, I was a tad bit upset at the moment". So I elected to let her put the baby to sleep as I do not like to torture dogs trying to save them when the vet doesn't think they can be saved. And this vet was pretty definate that he couldn't be saved.

If this puppy had an owner that had taken him to the vet immediately he would not have had his bowel die and have to be put to sleep. Sometimes I have to say that I really begin to hate people when I see things like this. So here a sweet puppy that might have been saved had he a caring owner who took him to the vet as soon as the bowel prolapsed and did not let him run loose to be picked up by animal control. Thankfully, he was picked up by an animal control who actually cares about dogs that need immediate help and they called me so we could get him to a vet. They thanked Lisa for getting there so fast to pick him up.

We did give him a name so he did NOT die nameless. We named him Willie and he went to sleep with us petting him and telling him he was very much loved.

We have things like this happen a lot where we get dogs that are too ill to save and either we have to put them to sleep or we incur the vet expenses trying to get them well and they die anyway. Those bills have to be paid even though we didn't get the dog well enough to adopt out so we could collect an adoption fee to pay on the vet bill. This is the part of rescue, most folks never even think about when they are not happy with our adoption fees, but we have to pay the vet bills and care for the dogs so we have to charge the adoption fees.