Family walks in shelter housing 4,000 dogs—then daughter calls for mom to look at four dogs

An American family was volunteering at an enormous animal shelter in Turkey when they noticed a litter of puppies dying, and so, they decided to take them home. They fully expected that the puppies wouldn’t make it—and some of them didn’t—but, amazingly, they could somehow see it: The tiniest pup was going to pull through!

Mary Bryant-Carucci moved to Ankara, Turkey, with her husband, three daughters, and their three chihuahuas in 2012 for her husband’s job. There, she and her daughters started volunteering at an animal shelter that held 4,000 dogs.

“It is a huge outside area, enormous, for 4,000 dogs—and that’s just one shelter. They’re makeshift cages—not nice cages or kennels or runs,” she told Dogster, adding that it is common to find dead rats and even dead dogs inside the cages, which hold 20 dogs each.

“I have some really good girls, and we’ve just always gone to the humane society to play with the dogs and cats. They always donated their money. We’ve always been animal lovers, but nothing like this,” Bryant-Carucci said.

“[Faith] was so malnourished, she could not walk. [She] would just sit in the back of the cage, and any time the big dogs would come, they would trample her,” Bryant-Carucci said.

“I was so overwhelmed. I felt helpless—I mean, when you’re walking through 4,000 dogs, and you have these dogs just crying for you to feed them …” she added.

Then one day, her oldest daughter, Abby, was calling for her on seeing a cage with a litter of puppies and some adult dogs. The four puppies, later named Faith, Hope, Chance, and Grace, were all sick.

Seeing the puppies’ dire situation, they decided to bring them home with them. “I knew they would die,” she said. The puppies were sick with distemper, a highly contagious viral disease, and three of them succumbed to it, leaving one puppy, Faith.

“Once we took her out of there and took her to our vet, they started care for the distemper. Once she was eating regularly, she just started improving, and we took her home,” Bryant-Carucci said.

After the vet let Faith go home with them, she was quarantined from the family’s three chihuahuas (even though they had been vaccinated), but as soon as the quarantine ended, the chihuahuas welcomed her into the group. Yet the family knew Faith still needed to learn how to be a dog.

“The girls would take her outside, and she would just kind of stand around,” Bryant-Carucci explained.

Things have changed since then, as three years later, Faith now runs about with her sister, another rescued street puppy, named Kara. Both dogs would even have a chance to go to America in 2016 when the family returned home for the summer.
Seeing the huge number of dogs on the streets and in shelters, Bryant-Carucci says, “You can’t help every single animal who’s suffering but for the ones that you can, you make a difference. That’s how I look at it—and that’s how my girls look at it.”
Watch the touching video below: