Tiny puppy saved from a terrible death after being tied to a tree with chemical burns

She had been hanging her laundry up to dry, and had she not been doing that at that moment, she might never have been able to save the pup's life.

A woman named Jess from Zebulon, Wake County, North Carolina, was hanging washing on August 30 when she heard a strange noise coming from the swamp bordering on the back of her house.

While noises from the swamp aren't unusual, Jess was immediately able to identify that the whine was not one she had heard from the muddy wetland before.

She moved closer to investigate, and saw, to her horror, that a tiny puppy had been tied up to a tree with a rope on a virtual island in the middle of the swamp.

Jess noticed he was pulling desperately away from the tree, trying to get free, causing the rope to cut into his little neck further.

She quickly waded the 100 yards through the knee-deep mud to get to the poor pup, and cut the rope with her pocket knife.

“There’s no way he could have made it through the mud on his own and ended up tangled around a tree like that. I barely made it through the mud,” she told the SPCA of Wake County.

Jess hurried back to her home, where she gave the traumatized pooch a bath, and tried her best to remove the maggots in his ears and inside the open wound on his neck. The more she pulled out, the more there seemed to be on him. She also named him Nash.

She took the pup to the SPCA, where their vet partners at Care First Animal Hospital took him in to clean up the wound on his neck and give him the required medicines to get better, including a bout of antibiotics.

While examining him, the vet also discovered that he appeared to have chemical burns on his tail and his ears.

Jess shared that he could easily have ended up being someone's lunch tied up out there, because she often sees and hears coyotes, bobcats, and wild boar near her home.

The vet was unable to determine how long the puppy had been tied up to that tree.

Once cleaned up, Nash was sent to a foster home while he heals.