💔 How do you find the words to say goodbye to the dog loved ‘round the world?

The dog who taught everyone to definitely not judge a street dog by their looks. 🥺

The dog that was definitely NOT a coyote. 😉

Today, we lost a legend. Today, we lost Jude.

We want to start this post by saying that we don’t have all of the answers yet, we don’t have the full explanation, and we would ask that you please refrain from comments with ideas of what this could’ve been. But you’re welcome to send us messages with them. For his mama and our team, please reserve the comments for sharing love and memories.

If you’ve been following our stories over the weekend, you may already know that Jude has been hospitalized since Saturday afternoon very suddenly. We are not including any of those photos because we don’t want to remember him that way.

Jude became strangely sick last week for just a couple of days, vomiting once, having explosive diarrhea once, being lethargic, not eating, and having eyes that were a little yellow/jaundiced. We thought he was just under the weather, but something felt off, so with the team effort, we got him to the hospital.

Once there, things started to become even more confusing. Through the several days of testing and treatment, from ultrasounds to bloodwork, the only things that were off were his liver and gallbladder markers and his clotting times. They were off the charts. Something was wrong, but what? Jude suddenly couldn’t clot blood, and his liver wasn’t working for him to detox his body of whatever was inside.

He needed an emergency blood plasma transfusion. We saw a slight improvement, but he needed another.

Allergic reactions, toxins, and lepto all came up. We spent hours doing our own research as usual and running down the list of what it could or couldn’t be. But it was a short list because Jude doesn’t go for walks; he lives in a house with a small backyard and a brand-new neighborhood without trees or foreign flowers. He lives in a house with cats, so there are no houseplants. We could easily eliminate most things.

We went from every angle - It rained, did he eat a deathcap mushroom that popped up? Does a neighbor have a sago palm and it was popping through the fence line? Did a squirrel carry over a seed of a sago palm? Does he have lepto? Was backyard water that collected contaminated?

No one knew.

By this morning, his liver enzymes had improved, but clotting time doubled. There was yellowing all over now and bruising. How was he getting worse? We were needing a third transfusion but they were out of plasma. In all of Austin. As we were arranging it to be picked up from San Antonio, Jude took a sudden and drastic turn. We had just moments left and ultimately had to say goodbye.

We are running a necropsy on Jude to hopefully get some answers and closure.

The cost to ultimately say goodbye was $7800. We are trying to relieve his mama of as much of this as we can.

We tried everything we knew to do. Jude has overcome so much in his short life and we doubt there will ever be a transformation like his. Everything we do moving forward will be in Jude’s honor. And if he did anything while he was earthside, we hope he encouraged you to save a street dog.

We love you, you wild blue-eyed coyote. 💙

Jude’s Final Fight

By TRAPRS

Jude’s Final Fight