Consider what might have been a routine surrender. A woman reported a very thin Pug in a fenced in yard behind a neighborhood house. She stated that she walked passed the house daily and offered to take the pug but the owner refused. The day I received the second call, the woman said she finally convinced the person to relinquish the dog. She said that he was under weight and probably had worms.

I was not prepared for what I saw when I went to pick him up. I met the woman at a waffle house off interstate I40. The couple pulled up in an older model brown car and when the door swung open a pug jumped out on a leash. My first thought was "hey he doesn't look to bad." A middle- aged woman got out of the car and laughed when I made that statement. "Oh no dear, that's not him. She reached inside her car and lifted out an extremely frail dog that could barely hold his head up. He was wrapped in a towel and as I took him from her I could feel every bone in his body. I sat him in the front seat of my car in a basket and tears ran down my cheeks as the towel slid off and exposed his emaciated body. I honestly did not know if he would live through the car ride.

We arrived at the veterinarian clinic where another rescue volunteer met us. We named him Homer, and he only weighed 12 pounds. He could barely raise his head to look at us but leaned into our arms as we held him. At the clinic we de-wormed him, tried to get him to eat and made him comfortable for the night. The following day, we checked on him and he had lost 3 pounds. The worms were leaving his system.

The vet ran many tests and at the end of a few days the blood test came back and he had an incurable disease due to the neglect and lack of food and water. A day later he went into seizures that could not be stopped and died. In this case we could not prove who the actual owners were and therefore could not press any charges. Animals like Homer deserve so much more than to be left in a backyard to starve to death.