“The clinic bestowed [on] her the nickname Smurf.”
“A volunteer came in with a weird face, saying that there was a blue puppy outside,” Zoe Hawthorne-Loizeaux, social media manager Darwin Animal Doctors, the group that runs the clinic, wrote on Facebook. “The vets didn’t really know what she meant … a puppy with a blue tongue? Blue eyes? A new kind of dog maybe? So they all went out to actually see in front of them a puppy … painted blue.”
Surprisingly, the owner hadn’t brought the 5-month-old husky, named Taylor, into the clinic because of the blue paint — instead, she’d brought her in because she wasn’t eating and had been “a bit down for a couple of days.” But the vet team immediately realized these symptoms had to do with the paint.
“Taylor was apparently playing with a bag of blue paint mix before her owner found her completely blue and throwing up paint,” Tod Emko, president of Darwin Animal Doctors, told The Dodo. “Thus, even though the pup’s name was Taylor, the clinic bestowed [on] her the nickname Smurf.”
Despite Taylor’s amusing appearance, the vet team was actually very worried about her health.
“Smurf came to us two days after the blue paint incident, which was a bit concerning because she had been throwing up blue paint for those two days,” Emko said. “No one is sure what kind of paint it was, but as you can imagine, it’s never good to eat paint.”
The vet team gave Taylor medication to help her get better, and asked her owner to wash her.
“Smurf’s human family washed her several times with dog shampoo,” Emko added. “However, although it’s most people’s instinct to scrub off the paint, we advised the owner not to — only to wash her gently and give her as many showers as it would take to get it all off, until she looks like a husky again.”
A few days later, Taylor returned to the clinic for a follow-up exam, and the vet staff were impressed by her speedy recovery.
“She passed her physical exam with flying blue colors, the staff all started taking pictures of the miracle baby,” Emko said.