‘Miracle Dog’ Finds Way Home

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. - It was about mid-September that Mockingbird Addition resident Amanda Ramey first spotted the dog.

“I thought he was cute and surely owned by someone and had gotten loose,” she said Tuesday.

She saw him in a neighbor’s yard and assumed that was his home. But as the beagle roamed the neighborhood she quickly realized he was a stray.

Christened Dusty Simon by the neighborhood children, the beagle soon became the subdivision hound - until sometime in mid-October. That’s when Dusty Simon disappeared for about two weeks.

What happened in that time is unknown, but the beagle’s own survival instincts coupled with the kindness of neighbors might have saved his life as well as brought him a new home.

“We didn’t know if someone dropped him off, but I think he showed signs of abuse,” Ramey said of the early days the beagle was found roaming her neighborhood.

“One day when he had come up in my yard I threw him a dog bone and he acted startled and scared by this, like I was gonna hit him with it,” Ramey said. “He just seemed wary of adults, especially men.”

She and her family offered food and water, and with time, the canine warmed up to her and her 4-year-old daughter, Chloe.

The neighborhood children adored him, Ramey said.

“He would always lie on his back so they could rub his belly. He loved having that belly rubbed,” she said.

That morning in October, however, they worried something was wrong. In the previous weeks they had grown accustomed to seeing Dusty Simon wander the subdivision, but they never saw him leave. Neighbors called animal shelters, but there were no dogs fitting Dusty’s description.

“We were worried. We had grown very attached to the little guy,” Ramey said.

For two weeks, they searched. Then one day last week, he was back, lying in the Ramey’s front yard. The family members were horrified to see that Dusty Simon could no longer walk. Somehow, he managed to use his front paws to drag himself to the yard.

“He is a miracle for the simple fact that he was able to crawl on those two front paws for who knows how many days and how many miles,” she said.

At that point, there was only once choice, Ramey said.

“He deserved to live. There was the option to have him put down, but I felt that a dog that fought for his life and crawled back to the home he felt loved and nurtured by deserved to live,” she said.

The family decided to officially adopt Dusty Simon. He was taken to Indian Ridge Animal Hospital in Kingsport, where veterinarian Michael Bunch discovered several fractures, which would require surgery.

“Both femurs were fractured in his rear legs. He had fractures in his pelvis, also one near the hip joint. He was also extremely malnourished,” the doctor said.

Bunch believes the dog was most likely injured by a vehicle.

“It takes some pretty powerful type of damage in order to cause the types of fractures so it’s likely he was hit by a car,” he said.

The bill for the surgery was expected to be about $2,000.

“My first initial thought was that I was gonna have to take out a loan,” Ramey said.  Instead, she solicited the help of family, neighbors and even strangers.

“Most of the donations were anonymous, but some came from neighbors and then my grandma, too,” Ramey said.

The surgery was performed Nov. 13, and Dusty is now recovering at the vet’s office.

“He’s doing well. He is healing well, he’s eating and drinking well, he’s feeling good and getting stronger every day,” Bunch said. “Usually, it takes about 10 days for skin to heal after the procedure so we want him to be here at least that long and then we’ll remove the stitches and see how he’s getting around.”

Dusty Simon’s case is especially sensitive because one of the leg fractures could not be corrected by surgery.

“The one leg had already started to heal enough to where we were just unable to break it back down and reset it,” Bunch said. “Over time, the bone will heal itself. It’s not gonna be perfect because it won’t go back to a perfect alignment, but he should be able to get around just fine.”

Neighbors now have a new nickname for Dusty, referring to him as the “miracle dog” because of his will to survive despite a critical injury.

It’s not a new story to Bunch. The vet said he has seen other cases of animals beating the odds.

“He wasn’t worried about his legs,” Bunch said. “He wasn’t worried whether he was going to get to do anything later in life. He was just worried about surviving and getting back to what he made his home, and of course he did.”

Kelly Cales is a multimedia fellow who can be reached at .