His dog days of summer are behind him!
A kind-hearted pack of Bay Ridgites rallied around a forsaken pooch who was left tied to a fence in the pouring rain last month, bringing him from abandoned to adopted in a matter of weeks. The man who originally found the pup said he felt a connection from the moment he saw him.
“I saw the sadness and the pain in this dog, and it really did hit me on some type of personal level,” said Anthony Elias. “It’s tragic that somebody could leave a life out there to fend for itself.”
Elias found the 20–30 pound dog — dubbed Lou by his savior — tied to a fence with an old, ripped harness and leash outside the Taco Bell at Fourth Avenue and 87th Street on the night of Aug. 18. He said he could tell that the young pup had been mistreated, or at least had suffered.
“He wasn’t properly cared for. He was whimpering like a little baby and you could see it in his face, he was still a puppy,” he said.
After he untied Lou from the fence, Elias brought him into the Taco Bell to make sure his owner had not simply left him outside. When nobody inside claimed the dog, Elias said he spent the next two walking Lou up and down 85th and 86th Streets between Third and Fourth avenues, trying to find his owner. Eventually, he bumped into another pair of Ridgites and told them about his plight.
Mallory McMahon said she and her partner, Alan Holt, knew that they had to help when Elias told them that he was planning on bringing Lou to a shelter, where she worried the dog would be put down.
The couple offered to take Lou home temporarily, and that night McMahon posted a photo of Lou with information about how he was found on the “Lost and Found Pets of Brooklyn” and “Bay Ridge Pets” Facebook groups in the hope of finding someone who could take him in permanently.
“The only thing that I regret is that I couldn’t have kept him,” McMahon said. “But I knew there was some place better for him that wasn’t with me.”
While waiting for a permanent home, Lou stayed with a friend of McMahon’s in New Jersey, who said the pup had a difficult adjustment at first, and that he was scared of her four other dogs. But soon Lou started playing with his new siblings, and more than anything else, he ate.
“He put on some weight and he filled out,” Christine Abood said. “He was super hungry — he just wanted to eat all day, every day.”
Lou finally found a loving, permanent home on Sept. 12 with Abood’s neighbor, who saw a post about Lou on Facebook and quickly fell in love.
“I just thought he was the cutest thing,” said Christine Piorkowski. “He met my other dogs and they instantly connected, and I thought it’d be a cute match.”
Piorkowski said that Lou is thriving in his new home — even if he prefers sleeping on the floor to his dog bed.
“He’s doing really well,” she said. “He’s active and running and healthy. But he doesn’t allow himself to be spoiled.”
