When a maintenance man entered a home complex in Wichita, Kansas to look into a burst pipe, he immediately sensed something was off.
A terrible scent assaulted him as soon as he opened an apartment door, and he soon realized there was a small plastic dog box in the room’s corner. Two 7-month-old puppies were housed there.
He thought it strange that the puppies weren’t making any noise despite the fact that it was obvious they were in agony.
“There was feces and urine just spilling out the front of the kennel,” Sarah Coffman, executive director of Wichita Animal Action League, told “Then he noticed that the puppies couldn’t open their mouths — so he shined a flashlight in the crate and realized that they had something wrapped around their muzzles, and that their noses were really swollen and red.”
Unsure of what to do, and unwilling to leave the two terrified puppies alone, the maintenance worker called a friend who fosters dogs for the Wichita Animal Action League. “She called us and was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell him to do,’” Coffman said. “I was like, ‘Tell him to wait right there. I’m on my way and I’m bringing the calvary.’”
With animal control officers by her side, Coffman entered the property, seized the puppies and rushed them to the vet.
When Coffman realized what was being used to keep the young pups quiet, she was astounded.
It was so tight that at first, Coffman said, “we believed it was wire wrapped around their noses.” It was little rubber bands that you’d put in your hair, no wider around than my thumb, that we discovered when we eventually managed to get them in the veterinarian’s office and hold them still so we could examine them.
The doctor estimated that the two rubber bands that were wrapped around the dogs’ nostrils for 12 to 24 hours. While Coffman and the two animal control officers there fought back tears, the vet snipped the bands with forceps.
The way they cried when those bands finally came off and the blood started to pour back to their noses was quite terrible, Coffman recalled. “We were helping them and doing the right thing,” he continued.
Had the bands been left on even a few hours longer, the puppies might have suffered major tissue damage, loss of smell or something far worse. “We really did catch them just in the nick of time,” Coffman added.
Soon the puppies will be ready for their forever home, and applications have already started flooding in. But though Westley and Debbie seem happy to forget their past — their rescuers have not been able to move on quite so easily.
“Last night I just kept thinking, ‘What if that pipe hadn’t burst? Would they have been found in time? Would they have lived?’” Coffman said. “You would never think that you would be thankful for a pipe bursting and flooding an apartment, but it literally saved two lives.”
“It makes you go home and hug your dogs a little tighter,” Coffman added.
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