Beaten, hung and left for dead - but look at Polly now
By CATHERINE WOULFE - Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 01 March 2009
PHIL DOYLE/Sunday Star Times
PUPPY LOVE: Polly the puppy was beaten, hogtied with duct tape and left hanging in a garage. But her unhappy start to life is behind her as she settles into her new home.
Polly the puppy - who last year was beaten, hogtied with duct tape and left hanging in a garage - has found a new home with a self- declared "soft touch".
The woman read Polly's "absolutely heartbreaking" story in the Sunday Star-Times and immediately felt a bond, she says.
Polly's former owner gave her to the SPCA after she was found hanging, with a broken leg and choking on her lead, in November in a garage in Warkworth, north of Auckland. No one has been prosecuted for the abuse and the pup's survival was touch-and-go - she was saved when a vet decided a $4000 operation could fix her badly damaged leg.
In the wake of our story, donations and adoption offers flooded in to the SPCA. Polly's new mum is shy of the spotlight but says the eight month-old german shepherd pup has been a little show-off since the moment they met.
The pup was rapt when her mum-in-waiting first visited her at the SPCA with her two other dogs - a labrador who is used as breeding stock for guide dogs, and a very exuberant huntaway - in tow. "She was delighted," says the woman, who lives in Auckland. "She wanted to show them her toys, and how she could blow bubbles in buckets of water."
On Friday Polly was eyeing up some chicken drumsticks, and her new owner said although they were meant to be people-food, Polly might just get lucky.
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