Injured and covered in porcupine quills, a stray dog was barely hanging on to life when an RV rumbled down a deserted Montana road and its passengers spotted him.
The van stopped, and the dog attempted to approach the large vehicle, searching for help.
The dog, later named Quill, didn’t know it yet, but he’d found his salvation.
The RV belonged to The ElleVet Project, a mobile veterinary clinic on a cross-country mission to provide routine care, specialized treatment and emergency services to pets in unhoused communities. And there was no way they were going to leave Quill behind.
“He had porcupine quills all over him, he had been attacked by another animal and had multiple wounds,” Amanda Howland, the cofounder of The ElleVet Project, told The Dodo. “He was thin and lethargic, and we feared for his life.”
The ElleVet team loaded Quill into the van so they could give him round-the-clock care on their drive from Montana to Maine.
“He was sweet as could be and didn’t make a peep as the vet examined him. We quickly got a sedative into him, and our veterinarian was able to remove all of the quills,” The ElleVet Project wrote on Instagram. “They were so deep and so painful it made the vet and our staff cry.”
Howland founded The ElleVet Project in 2020 with her business partner, Christian Kjaer, after the COVID-19 lockdown caused her to feel like she needed to enact some positive change. Her mind immediately went to unhoused members of the community and their pets.
“I started thinking about all the street pets and the unhoused and wondered how they would survive with shelters closed, no one on the street to give food or money, nowhere to go for veterinary care, with virtually no resources,” Howland said.
Within three weeks of the first lockdown, Howland and Kjaer had pulled together a team of vets willing to hit the road and rented the “ElleVan.”
Like Quill, Howland said there are so many pets who have left a lasting impression on her throughout the three years The ElleVet Project has been on the road.
“Even having seen thousands of pets, I can remember each one,” Howland said. “But of course, some tug at your heart in a special way, and one that comes to mind is a woman [named Terry] who came to our van with her small dog, Sophie, whom she had rescued from an abusive situation.”
Quill, however, was a unique case. Because he was a stray, The ElleVet Project team knew that, similar to Sophie’s situation, they had to find him a home he could call his own after treatment.
“He traveled across the country on the van — a dog who had never even been inside a house before!” Howland said. “He recovered from his injuries, and we placed him in a wonderful home.”
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