Dog was found Close to Death

When Vinny Currie noticed a van dropping something in a Kansas alley on Monday around 2 a.m., he immediately knew it wasn’t just trash. “In all honesty, I thought maybe a body or something,” the Wichita resident admitted after the fact. But when he got closer to the bundle abandoned behind his house, Currie saw that his hunch wasn’t that far off.

The approximately 1-year-old dog was severely emaciated, and only hours away from death.

“I could feel every single bone inside of her body,” Currie said. “It was heartbreaking.” He took her to local nonprofit rescue group Beauties and Beasts, where staffers couldn’t believe their eyes. Aadya the pit bull puppy weighed a mere 22 pounds, a sliver of the breed’s healthy size.

“You could almost see her lungs moving and her heart beating because there was no fat,” said board member Randi Carter. When veterinarians x-rayed the starving pup, they discovered a corn cob lodged in her intestines, causing large air pockets to form. A risky emergency surgery removed the blockage, but the extremely malnourished dog remained in critical condition.

Dr. Brock Lofgreen of Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Hospital of Wichita told KAKE yesterday that he was “cautiously optimistic.” He estimated that it took almost two months for Aadya to lose all of that weight, and the corn cob had been stuck for about a week.

While Aadya’s still under monitoring, she’s now getting tablespoons of food to ease back into eating solids again. Both Carter and Currie couldn’t believe how she got to this state.

“There are food banks in Wichita that offer pet food,” Carter told the Wichita Eagle. “You can always surrender a pet by reaching out to rescues. Everybody is usually pretty full, but we do our best to help. There are options … This is somebody that didn’t look for help. We believe this was 100% intentional animal cruelty.”