A few months ago, Audray Luck, founder of Georgia-based Luck’s Rescue, got a call from a woman who’d just found a stray dog on her property. While Luck was in the process of setting up a foster placement for the dog, the woman told Luck she’d given the dog away to a stranger.

Luck was disappointed and deeply concerned about the dog’s safety and well-being. She had no way of knowing where the pup had ended up and assumed she’d never get to help her.

The next morning, Luck got another call about a Shar-Pei who’d been abandoned at a local garbage and recycling transfer station. One of the transfer station’s employees had arrived at work and found the dog in the bathroom.

When Luck arrived and saw the dog, she couldn’t believe her eyes — the pup in the bathroom was the exact same one the woman had called about the previous day. As heartbroken as Luck was to see the Shar-Pei abandoned at a landfill, she was also relieved. The dog was finally going to get some help.

Luck pieced together that the dog was likely dumped at the landfill the previous night, when temperatures fell well below freezing. The Shar-Pei must have gotten cold and found shelter in the bathroom.

“[S]he was smart enough to find her way into that sheltered space to try to keep out of the wind and keep out of the weather,” Luck told The Dodo.

Luck could tell that the dog was in rough shape — she had skin issues and looked underfed. She rushed the pup, whom she named Petunia, to the vet, where they started her on medications and determined that she was going to need surgery on her eyelids.

“With Shar-Peis just having so much skin, their eyelids tend to roll inward, and then that causes an infection in their eye,” Luck said. “So they have to have this surgery — it’s kind of like an eye lift — to keep that eyelid from rolling in.”