“He’s a pretty brave little guy for having to go through everything that he went through.”
Wade Shapp was driving home from church with his wife on Sunday when they saw something that made him hit the brakes.
“We were on a country road on the way back to our house … and I looked over while I was driving, and I saw a dog’s head pop up,” Shapp, a resident of Princeton, Texas, told The Dodo. “Being out in the country, it’s common to see farm dogs out running on the road. But I noticed that he wasn’t moving, and he was in a bag. And I thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense.’”
Shapp and his wife Mandi, who are both big dog lovers, didn’t waste a minute. They leapt out of the car and went over to the dog.
“He was tied up in a feed sack,” Shapp said. “You could tell that it was done intentionally. There was rope tied around the bottom, so he didn’t have much room to move.”
The first thing the couple did was get the dog out of the sack. “We didn’t have a knife or anything to cut him out of the bag, so we had to use our car key,” Shapp said.
Then they wrapped him up in a coat and brought him into their car.
The dog, who is now named Bubba, seemed grateful to be rescued, but he was also frightened. “He was definitely scared, and he shook and shivered, probably for the first four or five hours that we had him,” Shapp said.
While Shapp doesn’t have any idea how long Bubba was in the feed sack, he has a feeling it was for about 24 hours.
“He smelled pretty bad,” Shapp said. “He had urine and stuff all over him.”
The Shapps drove Bubba back to their house. They fed him, made him a comfortable bed and bathed him.
It was during Bubba’s bath that he finally started to relax. “I felt like that was a big trust thing,” Shapp said. “I think he knows that we saved him.”
They took him to the vet the next day. While Bubba is generally healthy, they were shocked to discover that Bubba had a gunshot wound on the inside of his upper leg.
“I don’t know how I missed it, because it’s very large,” Shapp said. “There was no blood in the bag, but I think somebody definitely shot him, hoping to kill him, and that didn’t work, so they just put him in the bag and tossed him.”
Dallas DogRRR, a local dog rescue group, will be helping Bubba find his forever home. But the Shapps are in no rush to let go of him — they will foster him until he’s feeling better.
Bubba is getting along famously with the Shapps’ two other dogs, Isabella and Dixie. “Bubba is one of the family members,” Shapp said. “They get along pretty well.”
But it’s perhaps Shapp whom Bubba has formed the strongest bond with. Every day, Shapp brings Bubba to work with him, and Bubba follows Shapp everywhere. “Wherever I am, he goes, wobbling around on his little legs,” Shapp said.
Shapp is amazed by Bubba’s resilience, and he doesn’t think he’ll have any problem finding the perfect home when the time comes.
“He’s a pretty brave little guy for having to go through everything that he went through … and it’s pretty amazing to me for him to put all of his trust into someone else after all of the stuff that he’s been through,” Shapp said.
