When I saw this picture my heart melted. When I read she was 15 years old and had lived in a shelter together with 180 dogs on a concrete floor for many years, my heart stopped. I had to have her adopted to our hospice down in Italy. To find a candidate for our hospice and to chose only one is heart breaking. Some shelters do not adopt out their dogs, they only want the money (we turn these down). But in this case, we knew these volunteers from before and they accepted our wish to adopt Colomba.
My family and I drove and picked her up. The poor darling was so filthy, with a lot of matted hairballs together with old poop dried in. Her teeth were rotten and green and she could not eat dry food, and that had caused her to be just skin and bones. She also suffered with a chronic ear-infection that was so painful that she didn't want you to pet her head. She was anemic, and had an abscess as big as a man's fist on her neck, horribly infected. Colomba's heart was strong but body and mind exhausted.
We are very lucky at the same time to get a wonderful new volunteer. Ellen is an American veterinarian who recently moved to the Naples area. With her skills and passion, Colomba got her treatment right away. I loved when I heard Ellen call her "Princess." Together we took her for blood work and extra health examination at DR Damiani clinic.
We are all so madly in love with Colomba. Despite being in a cage on a concrete floor since 2005, her tail kept wagging when we bent down, looked into her eyes and told her how pretty she was. That tail tapping out the morse code for love: "thump, thump, thump." That's Amore.
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