Vets and vet nurses at Lort Smith are required to treat animals with serious injuries every day – injuries often deliberately inflicted by people.

We don’t always know what happened to animals before they come into our care. But we do know that they are coming to a place where they will be healed, treasured and cared for.

Vets like Dr Kassandra choose to work at Lort Smith because of a deep love for animals. It is their calling. And even though they often see animals with serious injuries, they tell me it never gets any easier. Especially when dealing with animals like Billy.

“Treating a patient like Billy … it is hard to express the feelings of horror that you have,” says one of our amazing vets, Dr Kassandra.

“It is very upsetting to think of an animal being in pain and suffering like this, for so long. Billy came to us with significant head injuries, but they weren’t fresh – they were likely at least a week old … He had been walking around in pain all that time. His level of suffering is hard to comprehend.”

Billy had very serious burns to his face. But how Billy could have received these injuries remains a mystery.

“We initially assumed that Billy had been hit by a car,” Dr Kassandra says. “[But] a lot of the trauma normally associated with being hit by a car, such as grated nails, were absent with Billy.

“Our most pressing concern was how dazed and dissociated he was. We thought he may be completely deaf because of how unresponsive he was.

“His general condition was pitiful – he was skinny, and his coat was matted and flea-ridden. He was moderately anaemic because of the fleas. I was very shocked at the state of him.”

We know it can be upsetting to read about Billy’s pain. But it’s so important that people who care about animals hear his story.

Our dedicated vets and vet nurses have the clinical skills to provide life-saving treatment, but we need partners like you to support that mission.

After cleaning Billy’s wounds and putting him on pain-killers and antibiotics to prevent infection, Dr Kassandra discovered that he wasn’t deaf. But that just meant we were dealing with something that can be even more difficult to manage — severe emotional trauma.

We knew that one of Lort Smith’s long-term foster carers Jacqui, was the perfect person to take on Billy’s care.

“I’ve been fostering animals for 15 years,” she told me. “My colleagues know I am a sucker for the ‘underdog’ and really desperate cases, so Billy was the perfect next dog for me to welcome into my home.”

But soon Jacqui realised that Billy had a longer journey to survive than we all thought.

“He had shut down to the human-animal bond and was so scared of me,” she says. “I slowly introduced him to my two dogs who are experienced foster siblings, and he was pleased to see them … but if I approached him, he panicked and fled.

“He would cower shivering in the corner and pretend I wasn’t there, in the hope that I would go away.”

It is heartbreaking to imagine what poor Billy must have endured that caused him to be so terrified of people. Sadly, Billy’s challenges were not over yet.

“One morning when I got up and greeted Billy, I noticed that he was very flat and seemed a bit disoriented,” Jacqui says. “I gently picked him up out of his bed and placed him down on the ground and he was very jerky and wasn’t able to walk straight.

“He then had two seizures in the space of 20 minutes. It was painful for me to watch him so confused. I tried to comfort him as best I could.”

Jacqui rushed Billy to Lort Smith Animal Hospital, where he spent two nights in the Intensive Care Unit with all-night veterinary care and monitoring.

While he was there, Dr Kassandra decided to do a CT scan of his head, to see whether he had an obvious mass or trauma that was causing his seizures.

That was when she discovered the gun pellet in Billy’s jaw.

Lort Smith is committed to providing high quality veterinary care, even for animals like Billy who don’t have loving owners to care for them. That is our mission, purpose and calling.

Billy deserves the healing treatment that we can offer, as do all other animals that come to us for help.

Finding the rubber bullet came as an enormous shock to Dr Kassandra and the team.

“We found it incidentally – you cannot feel it from the outside, and there was no associated swelling, which indicates it must have been an old injury,” she says.

We don’t always know what happens to animals before they come into our care. We can’t control that. But we can control what happens to them afterwards.

And for now, the team is doing everything we can to give Billy the best possible chance at recovery.

“Currently we are trialing Billy being slowly weaned off his seizure medication to assess whether the cluster of seizures he had in foster care is a random one-off event, or if he needs to be on this medication long term due to his head injuries,” says Dr Kassandra.

Given how extreme Billy’s fear and anxiety is, he has also been visiting another one of our vets, Dr Amanda, for regular acupuncture sessions.

“He enjoys these sessions with Dr Amanda,” Jacqui says. “It has definitely helped as part of his treatment plan. He is always very relaxed and calm afterwards. It is nice to be able to have access to this treatment option courtesy of Lort Smith to aid and assist with his recovery.”

We will always go above and beyond to help animals in need. That is what animal lovers do.

But the expression “it takes a village” is very true at Lort Smith. Which is why we need our community of animal lovers to stand alongside us and provide financial assistance whilst we care for animals that come to us battered, bruised, sick and traumatised.

I will never give up on a pet like Billy. Whilst he isn’t quite ready to be adopted yet, Jacqui agrees that his transformation over the past few months has been incredible – and she knows before long he will become a beloved family member.

That is the Lort Smith difference. Top quality veterinary care, dedicated foster carers, and a new life chapter for animals who come to us in need. All rolled into one.

“He is a completely different dog to the one I first brought home,” she says. “Whilst he is still quite shy, he’s very comfortable with me and loves to crawl into my lap for cuddles and seeks out all the pats he can possibly get!

“There is definitely a family out there that will love a special little dog like Billy… A family who will give him all the loving experiences that he has missed out on during his first years of his life.”

As Dr Kassandra says, its stories like Billy’s that give animal lovers like us the incentive to come to work every day.

“If we had not given Billy a second chance by providing top class veterinary care for free, we would never have realised his potential as a much-loved animal companion,” she says.

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Because animals like Billy need you and me to help write their next chapter — one full of health, safety and love.

Please donate and change the lives of animals’ like Billy today.