The first photo is from August 2008, when Bonnie Blossom rescued the puppy. By December, Mi Hija had grown into quite the lap dog. On her blog, Bonnie tells how she lost her dog Punkie but gained another: She was driving across the state when she stopped at a convenience store. She saw a dead dog in the road and a group of men standing around a pickup."The clerk explained that the guys were selling fighting dogs, and the one in the road was the mother that had jumped out of the truck the day before and gotten hit. On the way back to my car, I looked in the truck." She saw Mi Hija. "Shivering, covered in chicken shit and God knows what else, the little one obviously wasn't one of the fighters--she was a bait dog. You know, the ones they 'use' to teach the fighters how to tear something up."
Bonnie told the men that she wouldn't call the police if they gave her the puppy, and they did. (And she called Animal Services after she had driven away.)
"I picked her up--chicken shit and all--and the first thing she did was snuggle into my chest and start sucking on the pendant with Punkie's ashes in it. I looked up at the sky, whispered, "you win," and packed her off. How could I leave her there?"