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

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.

Like all our vets, Dr Kassandra works at Lort Smith because of a deep love for animals. And even though they often see animals with serious injuries, they say it never gets any easier. Especially when dealing with animals like Billy.

“Treating a patient like Billy, it’s hard to express the feelings of horror that you have,” she said.

“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 received these injuries remained 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.”

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’s challenges were not over yet.

“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.

Then 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 and Jacqui rushed him 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.

“We were shocked! 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.

Now, Jacqui and the Lort Smith team are doing everything we can to give Billy the best possible chance at recovery, including weaning him off the seizure medication.

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.”

While Billy 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.

“He is a completely different dog to the one I first brought home,” she says. “While 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, “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,”.

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.

Please consider making a donation to our Winter Appeal.

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

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