When Carlie went to a pet shop event to pick up her mom’s foster dog. However, it was there that she would meet a dog that would change her life.
When she saw Shorty, a senior chihuahua sitting in a corner alone, she knew she had to do something about him.
“He looked so sad. He was overweight and old; I just felt like I needed to take him home,” 25-year-old Carlie Cahill told Geobeats.
So, Carlie took her mom’s foster dog and left the store, but she couldn’t forget about Shorty. So, after a couple of days, she called someone and asked what the name of the rescue who had the chihuahua was.
It didn’t take long. She soon contacted the rescue and arranged to meet Shorty again. Shortly after, Carlie adopted the senior dog, determined to help him lose weight and live his best life.
Indeed, Carlie took Shorty to the vet, and he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which she didn’t know when she adopted him.
As the woman assumed, the little dog was so obese partly because his condition had not been diagnosed earlier.
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Shorty used to live with a woman who owned another couple of chihuahuas, none of which was this fat.
When the woman passed away, the dogs were taken to the rescue center, but Shorty was the most difficult to find a home because of his age and appearance.
You see, dogs that belong to this breed typically weigh 4-6 pounds, while Shorty weighed 18.
The combination of suffering from hypothyroidism and being overfed, led the pup to turn into a fluffball that practically couldn’t move.
Thanks to Carlie, however, Shorty soon lost all the excess weight and became the active and playful dog he had always been inside.
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“He had so much extra weight,”Carlie explained, “at first, besides going to the bathroom, I didn’t want to take him on walks with all that weight on his joints.”
Soon, thanks to the medication the vet prescribed, and thanks to the high-protein diet Carlie put him on, Shorty lost 11 pounds.
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Little by little, he started joining Carlie for short walks outside, and when he was ready, he started running and chasing squirrels- which proved to be his favorite hobby.
Carlie admitted that she’d never felt so close to a dog as she did with Shorty.
As time went by, Shorty even got closer to the other dog of the house, Toad.
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The bigger dog, four-year-old Toad, treated the senior chihuahua as his little baby, but Shorty kind of just tolerated him being around.
The three of them had so much fun together, with Carlie enjoying Toad and Shorty being around.
Sadly, three years after the little dog came into the woman’s life, he passed in the summer of 2021.
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And, although Carlie is happy to have spent at least three years with him, she is sad because she would love to have had the chance to spend more time with him.
Watch Carlie and Shorty’s story in the video below.
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