Guys, this is Pig. Pig is a dog and she makes my heart do somersaults. She’s from Alabama and is the belle of the ball, aka Birmingham’s annual Do Dah Day pet parade. As you probably noticed, Pig is a little unusual looking for a dog and captures the attention of everyone who meets her. She’s a little … pig-like in stature. According to AL.com, ”Pig was born in the woods northeast of Atlanta last fall to a feral mother. … Pig is missing part of her spine; she’s missing several ribs. And she has vertebrae that are fused and twisted. Near her neck, her spinal cord splits into two separate cords. Her hips and joints are rotated in the wrong positions.”
But! “Pig’s profound birth defects make her survival and attitude remarkable.”
Pig, a mutt, loves to run and play like any other dog and doesn’t appear to be in pain, though there is the fear that as the eight-month-old pup gains weight, her body won’t be able to handle it. Kim Dillenbeck heard about Pig through some neighbors and decided to adopt the dog instead of letting the woman who found her put her down. “Pretty quickly, I decided to be her mother because she probably wouldn’t live,” Dillenbeck said. “We assumed that by now, she would be suffocating under her own organs, or something like that, because of her shape.”
As for the vet’s prognosis for Pig? “They’ve never seen anything like it, and they say it’s going to be interesting,” Dillenbeck said. “I think [the vet] knows as well as I do that whatever time we get with her is our gift. I’m the lucky one. She makes me laugh every day.”
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