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The dog with the crooked leg |
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| Dani has found a new home with the Ambelang family of Hamilton after Bitterroot dog lovers chipped in $2,500 to pay for surgery on her crooked leg. PERRY BACKUS - Ravalli Republic |
by PERRY BACKUS - Ravalli Republic
Dani had a crooked leg, but she didn’t care.
She was sweet and smart and so full of life that everyone who took a minute to see couldn’t help but become enamored with the young husky-cross.
She was hardly a year old when her owner brought her to the Bitter Root Humane Association shelter in Hamilton.
“Dani didn’t know she had a crooked leg when she came to us,” said Vicki Dawson, the shelter’s manager. “She acted like she didn’t care. She could still get around and that was good enough for her.”
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Somewhere early in her life something bad happened to her left front leg. Maybe it broke. Or maybe nature played a cruel trick.
Whatever the reason, one of the two bones in her foreleg stopped growing. As a result, the bottom of it twisted sideways almost at a 45 degree angle.
When the young dog first came to the shelter, she immediately captivated the crew who worked there with her personality and charm.
Christina Orru remembers the day she first saw her.
It was the same day Orru fell in love.
“I could tell she was special from the very first time I saw her,” Orru said. “She liked everyone. She had a sweet personality … she was so full of life. I fell in love with her.”
When she wasn’t working as a scientist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Orru often volunteered at the animal shelter. Since she was scheduled to return to her home in Italy in a bit more than a year, Orru couldn’t adopt a dog herself.
Orru saw that people looking for a new dog looked right past Dani.
“No one asked even to look at her,” she remembered. “No one was interested. I thought it was probably because of her deformity.”
Orru noticed something else too. Dani’s leg was getting worse.
The folks at the shelter took the dog to see Dr. Hans Boer of Hamilton’s Companion Pet Clinic.
“I could see right away that it wasn’t going to be a very functional limb,” Boer remembered. “A dog’s fourth leg is a spare. Sometimes they are better off with no limb rather than one that’s painful.”
In the worst case scenario, Boer said he would have considered amputation.
Instead he took an X-ray and sent it to a surgeon in Bozeman. The cost to repair Dani’s leg was about $2,500.
It was more than the shelter could afford to spend on a single animal.
“I thought we should try to raise the money,” Orru said. “I thought it would be hard with the economy the way it is now.”
She made up some posters and with help from other volunteers pinned them to walls all around town. She talked to friends who talked to their friends.
“We all know a lot of dog lovers,” Orru said.
Within two weeks, the money was raised and Dani was on her way to Bozeman. Dr. Mark Albrecht performed the surgery needed to make Dani’s leg straight again.
“Dr. Albrecht’s staff immediately all fell in love with her,” Dawson said. “Half the staff was in tears when we came to pick up her up.”
Her leg was splinted and Dani went to a foster home to heal.
“It was tough for her,” Dawson said. “She wanted to run and jump and play. She felt so good within a couple of days after the surgery, but we had to keep her from bouncing on it too much for eight weeks.
“It wasn’t easy,” she said.
About a month ago, Dani’s photograph appeared in the Ravalli Republic.
She was ready to find a home.
This time when the people came, they didn’t walk past her kennel. They opened the door and took her home.
Dani now lives with Linda Ambelang and her son and daughter, Andy and Alex. She joins a family who’ve already opened their home to strays and rescue dogs.
The oldest of their three pets was getting tired and liked to sleep the day away. That left the family’s border collie needing a new energetic friend.
“We saw this picture of Dani in the newspaper in an advertisement sponsored by Four Paws Fencing,” Linda Ambelang said. “We all decided that she looked like the kind of dog that would fit right into this family.”
And she has done just that.
“It was so worth it,” Dawson said. “She’s a winner. Everybody loves Dani.”
The Bitterroot Humane Association’s Board of Directors was so taken by Dani’s story that it decided to create a fund in Dani’s honor to help pay for similar operations for shelter animals in the future.
Albrecht donated back $500 to help get the fund started.
“We got our happy ending,” Orru said. “Dani has a great family now. It’s the best thing that could have happened for her … It’s just the best ending I could have imagined.”
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Editor Perry Backus can be reached at 363-3300 or
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