A Second Chance For Budi

The Beginning
    We first met Budi in early February when she came to the clinic with her 6 week old puppies. Budi was very skinny and was still nursing the puppies. We found out that she had just been moved to Prior Lake from a home in northern Minnesota. Despite all of this she walked in as a very happy dog, wiggling her little stump of a tail and her whole body - she was really interested in meeting people.  We checked her out and told her new caretakers to increase her food. We hoped to see her with a few more pounds on her body at her recheck appointment in a few weeks. The next time we saw Budi she had injuries to her ear and neck that were a week old. She had been attacked by a couple of dogs that were out roaming free. Budi was a little more timid, but allowed our staff to clip and clean her wounds and get her stitched up.  She was a good girl!
   Then, on March 22nd we saw Budi again. Her caretaker wasn't very happy with her and asked that she be euthanized. She was a very scared dog, barely crawling into the clinic. We were shocked at the change. She had put on about ten pounds but her confident, happy demeanor was gone. We took her in and got her settled in a kennel. Then we started the path to finding her true owner to see how she would like to handle the situation. The next day the owner called and stated that she could not take Budi back and did not want to have her euthanized. She had recently seen her and was shocked to see that the happy confident dog she had last seen about 45 days ago was now a timid and very fearful dog. The owner shed a few tears and asked that we do what we could to help Budi. She then officially surrendered Budi to our Practice Manager, Kathy Hennen.
   Oh boy, now what?  We definitely are not in the business of rescuing dogs. As much as we would like to be able to this, we just aren't set up for it. We leave that to the professionals. There are so many wonderful organizations that do such a good job of this. But.....this seemed like a really special, unique situation.
   As Kathy hung up the phone, she turned to see two staff members waiting for the good news - we could save Budi!  Deb, our groomer, offered to give Budi a bath and Haley offered to help.  The bath was a little scary for Budi but she was a trooper, she didn't even bat an eye when Deb trimmed her nails. Afterwards Deb put a pretty bandana around her neck. We gave her a good meal and tucked her into her kennel for the night - it had been a long couple of days for Budi. We all hoped that the next day we would see her tail wag.

(Check back for more of the story!)