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Woman shocked after dog she took to shelter to be euthanized was up for adoption again a year later
Exhausted and short on options after consulting two veterinary clinics, Kristie Pereira made the gut-wrenching decision last year to take her desperately ill puppy to a Maryland shelter to be euthanized.
So she was stunned last week to find the dog up for adoption at the same pet rescue organization where she had gotten it.
“I have a lot of questions, but first and foremost, I want him back with me,” Pereira told The Associated Press on Friday.
Pereira, who now lives in San Antonio, said she was working from home in Maryland when she paid $450 in late 2022 to adopt a 2-month-old hound mix from a local group, Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation.
She named the puppy Beau, and the two quickly became inseparable. Beau snuggled next to her as she worked, slept in her bed and even tagged along with her when Pereira would leave the house. But within weeks, it became clear something was wrong with the puppy, Pereira said.
Kristie Pereira / AP
A veterinarian concluded that the issue was most likely neurological. Blood tests did show the dog might have a liver problem, so Pereira was sent home with liver enzymes and told that she would “see improvement pretty fast” if Beau’s liver was the issue.
The dog’s condition only worsened. The dog’s veterinarian, the clinic’s lead veterinarian and an animal emergency room veterinarian all agreed the dog’s inability to control his bowels and lift his hind legs pointed to a severe neurological problem, Pereira said.
The cost to run a series of tests to find out, she said, was quoted as high as $12,000. Despite the sticker shock, Pereira, 32, who works in digital marketing, said she would have found a way to pay it if it would save Beau.
Instead, she was told “there’s a very slim chance of finding what is wrong,” she recalled. “And even if we do, there’s an even smaller chance of it being something that we can fix.”
That is when they began suggesting that it might be more humane to euthanize the puppy. She wasn’t ready to consider that option, she said, and held out for another month.
Throughout all of it, Pereira said, she was consulting staff at Lost Dog & Cat Rescue.
“Honestly, I mean, after I talked to them is really when I felt, you know, that I was going to be doing the right thing by putting him down,” Pereira said. “They really gave me that support and that encouragement that, although it’s hard, sometimes that’s the best thing to do.”
Following several sleepless nights with Beau clearly in pain, Pereira said she took Beau to Montgomery County Animal Services in Derwood, Maryland, in late March 2023 and paid $15 for him to be euthanized. She was told that the shelter’s policy does not allow people to stay with their pets as they are put down.
It was during a visit to see her mother in Maryland last week that curiosity sent her to the rescue’s website to check out dogs up for adoption — and spotted Beau’s picture. The puppy was bigger but had the same markings and bore the name the rescue had given him before she adopted him: Amos Hart, based on a character in the musical “Chicago.”
Calls to the shelter confirmed that her dog had not been euthanized after veterinarians there didn’t think he needed to be. The shelter instead called Lost Dog & Cat Rescue and turned the puppy back over to them.
The rescue confirmed that Friday in a written statement, giving an extensive timeline showing that its veterinarians found no neurological issues with the dog. After tests diagnosing a liver problem and a $7,000 surgery — paid for through a GoFundMe campaign — the dog was declared healthy.
Matthew Barakat / AP
None of it was shared with Pereira, who said Friday she would pay the $7,000 cost to get Beau back. It took several days for anyone at the rescue to return her calls, she said, and when they did, it was not anyone Pereira had talked with before.
“The person that called me was so rude and just disrespectful and just being really nasty towards me,” she said, breaking down in tears. “Just saying, you know, that I abandoned him, and that I left him to die. That I never cared about him.”
Pereira was told that the dog “will never go back to you.” Then the person hung up.
Rescue spokesperson Chloe Floyd would not answer questions about whether someone at the rescue said those things to Pereira. But she defended the decision not to return the dog.
“LDCRF does not re-home an owner-surrendered dog with its former adopter/owner,” Floyd said in her written statement. “Our mission is to save adoptable and safe-to-the-community dogs from euthanasia.”
The rescue acknowledged that it had spoken to Pereira during her deliberation about whether to euthanize the puppy, but it said it had made clear to her the importance of taking the dog to a veterinarian that would allow her to be with the animal when it was euthanized. If she could not do that, it emphasized, the rescue would take the dog back.
The rescue and the shelter both faulted Pereira for not consenting to the extensive testing to see if it was suffering neurological issues.
Caroline Hairfield, executive director of Montgomery County Animal Services, said that it is bound by contract to return surrendered animals back to the rescue and that its hands are tied.
Hairfield said of Pereira that “everyone feels for her,” but that it’s up to the rescue on whether it will return the dog to her.
“That’s a civil issue between the two of them,” she said. “We haven’t had the animal in our care for a year.”
The dog remained available for adoption Friday on the rescue’s website.
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Moscow — Former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, famous for his tattoos of Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Wednesday announced that he plans to leave Russia. The Ukrainian-Russian dancer was one of the most prominent stars who backed Russia’s unilateral 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military assault on Ukraine. He was rewarded with prestigious state posts.
In a rambling, misspelled message on his Instagram account, Polunin wrote: “My time in Russia ran out a long time ago, it seems at this moment that I have fulfilled my mission here.”
The post first appeared Sunday on his little-read Telegram account.
Ian Gavan/Getty
Polunin, 35, did not give a specific reason for leaving but said that “a time comes when the soul feels it is not where it should be.”
He said he was leaving with his family — his wife Yelena and three children — but “where we will go is not clear so far.”
In the summer, the dancer complained of a lack of security and said he was being followed.
Polunin, who was born in Ukraine, backed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — a prelude to the ongoing, full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Putin launched in February 2022.
The dancer was granted Russian citizenship in 2019. He was appointed acting head of a dance academy in occupied Crimea’s biggest city, Sevastopol, and director of the city’s opera and ballet theatre, for which a large new building is under construction.
Just last year he was decorated by Putin for his role in popularizing dance. But in August he was replaced as head of the dance academy by former Bolshoi prima Maria Alexandrova, and a week ago, Russia’s arts minister Olga Lyubimova announced his theater director job would go to singer Ildar Abdrazakov.
This came after on December 9 Polunin published a social media post saying he was “very sorry for people” living in the heavily bombarded village near Ukraine’s city of Kherson, where his family originates from, and that “the worst deal would be better than war.”
Ian Gavan/Getty
Aged 13, Polunin won a scholarship to train at the Royal Ballet School in London and became its youngest ever principal dancer.
With his tattoos — including a large depiction of Putin’s face emblazoned prominently on his chest — and his rebellious attitude, he became known as the “bad boy of ballet” and caused a sensation by resigning from the Royal Ballet at the height of his fame in 2012.
Later he made a 2015 hit video to Irish musician Hozier’s song “Take Me to Church” and was the star of a 2016 documentary called “Dancer.”
He moved to perform at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Musical Theatre’s ballet before launching a solo career, starring in dance performances in roles including the mystic Grigory Rasputin.
In 2019 he posed for AFP with a large tattoo of Putin on his chest which he later supplemented with two Putin faces on either shoulder. He also has a large Ukrainian trident on his right hand.
This year he took part in Putin’s campaign for reelection as a celebrity backer.
Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to consider South Carolina health department’s effort to cut off funding from Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions, wading into another dispute over access to the procedure in the wake of its reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The case, known as Kerr v. Edwards, stems from the state’s decision in 2018 to end Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s participation in its Medicaid program. Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, directed the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to deem abortion clinics unqualified to provide family planning services and end their Medicaid agreements.
Planned Parenthood operates two facilities in the state, one in Charleston and the other in Columbia, and provides hundreds of Medicaid patients with services like physicals, cancer and other health screenings, pregnancy testing and contraception. Federal law prohibits Medicaid from paying for abortions except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Planned Parenthood and one of its patients, Julie Edwards, sued the state, arguing that cutting off its funding violated a provision of the Medicaid Act that gives beneficiaries the right to choose their provider.
A federal district court blocked South Carolina from ending Planned Parenthood’s participation in its Medicaid program, and a U.S. appeals court upheld that decision, finding that Edwards could sue the state to enforce the Medicaid Act’s free-choice-of-provider requirement.
The legal battle has already been before the Supreme Court in the past, with the high court last year ordering additional proceedings after deciding in a separate case that nursing home residents could sue their state-owned health care facility over alleged violations of civil rights.
After reconsidering its earlier decision, the three-judge appeals court panel ruled unanimously in March that Edwards’ lawsuit against the state could go forward and said South Carolina couldn’t strip Planned Parenthood of state Medicaid funds.
“This case is, and always has been, about whether Congress conferred an individually enforceable right for Medicaid beneficiaries to freely choose their healthcare provider. Preserving access to Planned Parenthood and other providers means preserving an affordable choice and quality care for an untold number of mothers and infants in South Carolina,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote for the 4th Circuit panel.
South Carolina officials asked the Supreme Court to review that decision, marking the third time the case has been before the justices. The justices agreed to take up the question of whether “the Medicaid Act’s any-qualified provider provision unambiguously confers a private right upon a Medicaid beneficiary to choose a specific provider.”
South Carolina is among the more than two dozen that have passed laws restricting access to abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision reversing Roe v. Wade. In South Carolina, abortion is outlawed after six weeks of pregnancy with some exceptions.
Several states have also enacted laws blocking Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding, including Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi and Texas.
