When Jaryd Horsley arrived home from work at 2:30 am, he heard a growl. A horrible person tied a young, starving pit bull to the side of a nearby dumpster, leaving her alone and cold in the dark as if she was trash to be thrown away.
“She was tied up,” Horsley said, “with just a leash wrapped around her neck, you know, kinda starting to choke her just trying to sit down.”
The dog was in bad shape, she’d lost patches of her fur and her skin looked inflamed. She was so skinny that her ribs were sticking out.
“If you know what a scared animal sounds like, that was it,” Horsley said. “It’s heartbreaking. She’s such an innocent puppy.”
He immediately went to get his fiancée to tell her what he’d found and grabbed some chicken to feed the dog.
“I threw a small piece of chicken but the dog was tied up so tight to the dumpster that she could not reach the food,” Horsley’s fiancée would later write on their GoFundme page. “She savagely ate the little pieces of chicken once Jaryd had pushed the food towards her with his shoe.”
Eventually, she let them get close enough to pet her. “It was so difficult to untie her since she could not breathe even if I pulled slightly,” wrote Horsley’s fiancée.
They brought her back home and named her Phoebe. “She was so cold, but was so happy that we found her and fed her,” she continued. “Jaryd grabbed one of our comforters and used it as a bed for the dog.”
They took Phoebe to the vet the next morning, the diagnosis wasn’t good. Aside from a bad skin infection, eight-month-old Phoebe also had a heart murmur. If left untreated, she would only have a year to live.
Money was an issue. Horsely was in the Marine Corps, and she was a college student already working a part-time job. The bill to treat Phoebe would be in the thousands. They paid as much as they could that morning.
“I just want her to be happy,” Horsley said, “be comfortable, have a good life, no matter how long it is.”
So they started a GoFundMe page, and have managed to raise enough money to treat her heart disease. Phoebe may have to be on medication for the rest of her life.
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