VIDEO: An Eight Month Nightmare Is Over For A Local Pet Owner

LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) –  A recent animal abuse case leads to the rescue of twelve malnourished dogs, ending an eight month nightmare for a pet owner.

It’s been a week since the dog was found, and the owner says it was starved and abused.

Now, the pup and its owner are going through the recovery process.

Meet Fiona. She’s a little over a year old, but has been abused and missing for most of her life.

Before Fiona went missing, Ellen Gregory says she was a fat and happy dog, full of life.

When they reunited a week ago, it looked like the life had been sucked out of the 37 pound German Shepherd mix.

“It was a completely different dog, you know, she didn’t recognize me. You see those videos on Facebook and you expect a beautiful reunion and she didn’t recognize me. She had gone through so much trauma and abuse that she was scared, you know, you went to go touch her and she would coward down,” says dog owner, Ellen Gregory.

Gregory says Fiona is bouncing back quickly, but there’s still a long way to go.

Right now, they’re feeding her more and giving her lots of love and patience.

“She’s heartworm positive now, so that’s a difficult thing that she’s going to have to go through, treatment. That’s also very expensive. There’s going to be a lot of long lasting physical trauma from this, because she was taken as a puppy, she did not get to fully mature, so she’s actually growth stunted. She’s about half the size that she should be.”

As soon as Fiona went missing, Gregory posted missing dog flyers and ads on Facebook.

Never giving up, is why her furry friend is back by her side for the first time since June of last year.

“The reason she got her pet back is because she was very religious about posting it on one of the lost pet pages, and she would bump it every few weeks, she would bump it. It was always fresh on our minds because we saw it, and when that dog came in, it looked eerily similar, and that’s how she got her dog back,” says Columbus-Lowndes Humane Society Manager Jason Nickles.

Gregory says people need to realize what’s going on in our own backyards.

Nickles says people would be surprised at the number of abused animals that come in.

“They come in neglected, starved, emaciated, that kind of thing. Sometimes, they come in with collars completely embedded in their necks. Some of them come in so starved they can’t even walk.”

Fiona is one of twelve dogs found chained and tied to a tree in Lowndes County last month.

“Even if it is ‘just a dog,’ that’s still a life. She still has feelings, nothing deserves that treatment, so like I said, I would love to use her as kind of an ambassador for animal abuse, and try to take this horrible situation and make something good out of it.”

Lowndes County Investigators have charged 47 -year old Anthony Cochran in connection with the discovery of Fiona and the other pets at the site off Sand Road.

The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department says Cochran is charged with animal cruelty and failure to obey law enforcement.

Animal Control contacted the sheriff’s department for assistance on February 17th, after they saw a horse running loose in the woods, and came across a dozen dogs chained up, in poor living conditions without food or water.

All of the dogs were taken to the Columbus-Lowndes Humane Society.

Cochran’s court date will be March 14th.