Crying, Beaten Dog Discarded With Rotting Food, but Rescuers Had No Idea How Bad It Was

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It happened just before Christmas in 2018. In downtown Long Beach, California, passersby heard faint sounds of distress coming from a dumpster. Not underneath or behind, but inside. When they opened the dumpster to see what it was, there was a dog that had been subjected to some of the most shocking abuse that animal shelter employees had ever seen.

The dog had been thrown inside an old trash bag, and as Diane Kliche, a board member of Fix Long Beach Pets and Animals, told KTTV in Los Angeles, “she was covered in old spaghetti, ham, and pieces of onion that were in her matted fur.”

But that wasn’t even half the evil that had been done to this innocent puppy.

Once they got her to the vet, what they found was even more shocking. She hadn’t just been tossed out with some rotting food, she had been beaten so severely it had broken her bones. As Kliche told KTTV, vets were worried that “her neck was broken and her leg was snapped in half.” After more exams, “it turned out that she has a skull fracture (and) she probably has some broken ribs.”

To literally add insult to injury, the demented person responsible had urinated on the dog. As Kliche said to KTTV, “this was disgusting, it’s just so unnecessary.” She added that it was everyone’s best interest to bring the perpetrator to justice because “someone who is abusing animals like this will move on to people.”

Together with the organization JustFoodForDogs, the good people at Fix Long Beach Pets and Animals managed to raise over $10,000 as a reward to try to bring the perpetrator to justice. Meanwhile, they set out to help the dog, which they named Chloe, get her health back, to start walking and playing again, and to learn to trust people again after the horrific pain she had endured at the hands of her torturer.

Love, support, and donations poured in for Chloe from all over California and the world. After fostering her for a time to make sure that she was ready to live with other people and dogs, Fix Long Beach created a lottery system to choose a family from the hundreds that had applied to adopt her!

The lucky parents Doug and Maryann James were ecstatic and in slight disbelief that they had been chosen to host this special dog. As new mom Maryann James told KTLA in Los Angeles, “they called in the evening and we had been crying and crying. Our eyes were just swollen from crying the whole day from happiness and joy.”

The couple had also adopted an older poodle named Beatrice, since Chloe was in particular need of comfort and reassurance after the savage beating and heartless abandonment by her previous owner. Radiant adoptive dad Doug James told KTLA, “we’re already in love with her and can’t wait to spend many, many happy years with her and her sister Beatrice.”

While the perpetrator remains at large, the reward for their capture has been raised to $25,000 as of April 2019. Facebook followers of Chloe and supporters of Fix Long Beach were incredibly pleased to see that they hadn’t given up the search for the monster responsible.

As Rochelle Robinson posted on the Save Chloe page, “I love that this ended well because of Chloe’s resilience, bravery, and will to live...and because of her lovely fosters and her lovely adopters and because of Fix Long Beach Pets and Animals‘ dogged (pun intended) determination to heal her and help to right an evil, evil wrong.”