As a foster for Animal Care Services, Kelly Oyler has seen dogs with wounds that would make many people turn away. Instead, her love for animals gives her the confidence to step in to care for those that are severely broken and injured.
However, even Oyler was shaken when she saw Rusty, one of the most neglected dogs in ACS history.
The adult dog weighed only 17 pounds when he was found almost starved to death. Blood leaked from his cracked skin, splotched with scabs, pockmarks and mange. Not a wisp of hair was left on his face.
It was the worst case of abuse she'd ever seen. Without a second thought, she took the barely alive dog home.
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"I was just horrified when I saw him," Oyler, 36, told the San Antonio Express-News. "It looked like his spirit was broken."
She has fostered dogs from the shelter since Valentine's Day of 2013, after her dog Hoagie died. Instead of taking in another pet, she decided to foster and save more animals.
Oyler has help caring for her boarders. Sonny, her amputee pet, has been instrumental in helping Rusty learn how to be a dog again.
Within hours, word of the abused dog's condition spread on the Internet, and people across Texas and the nation took up his cause.
Someone in Minnesota sent him a blanket. A local woman crocheted sweaters for him because he didn't have any hair and was still skinny. Adoption offers came from Willis in East Texas and Austin and the states of Maryland and Washington.
The ACS staff named him Rusty because they thought he needed a fresh start from his previous name, spokeswoman Lisa Norwood said.
To keep the pooch's audience up to date, Oyler created a Facebook page called "Rusty the San Antonio Miracle Dog." The page had almost 850 likes Sunday and the number is growing, just like his followers.
Oyler said they've had countless comments from people upset about what happened to Rusty.
What's not widely known is how ACS cruelty investigators Manuel Flores and Joel Skidmore found Rusty. ACS received a call about a dog in bad shape. They found him lying in a back yard on Briaridge Drive, north of Interstate 10 and Loop 410, curled in a ball and covered with leaves. The officers said there wasn't any water or food in sight and Rusty appeared near death.
Cruelty charges are pending against the owner, Norwood said.
Oyler takes him to ACS every day for ongoing treatment. In May, though evidence of mange did appear, his doctor said he was healing and doing better. They've since noted more hair growth.
ACS field operations supervisor Audra Houghton said it's rare to see an animal such as Rusty still alive in such a bad condition, much less survive. She said when she saw him in March, he was skin and bones. But when she saw him at the ACS campus a few weeks ago, she didn't recognize the happy, furry dog. He was thicker, jumping around Oyler, eating treats and wagging his tail.
"He was just a little fighter; he was giving us signs he wanted to make it and bounce back," Houghton said. "It's so great when we have those success stories like Rusty. It gives us hope that each one we find like that has a chance."
Oyler said being a foster is essential to the city's no-kill movement and a way to save the city's stray and neglected pets.
"I never doubted that Rusty was going to make it," Oyler said. "It was rough in the beginning. But if he was able to make it without love from anyone, I knew once he was with me, he was going to make it. (But) it was all him, he has a strong spirit."
