Talk about a rubbish day with a happy ending. A starving dog was dumped in a Milwaukee trash bin – and only a freak accident kept him out of the crusher.
It was a routine morning on Naz Nalls’ Milwaukee garbage route. Then a bin did something bins almost never do.
It slipped off the truck and hit the pavement before the load could be crushed.
“Usually, it don’t fall off. That’s what’s crazy about this. I feel like it was kind of destiny,” Nalls told TMJ4.
Inside the toppled bin was a dog. Skin and bones, filthy, weak – and, somehow, still wagging.
Nalls and his partner, Omar, called their supervisor, Alex Halverson, who was already headed their way.
“The first time I pulled him out of the garbage can, he let me pick him up,” Halverson said.
The dog was starving, so Halverson handed over his lunch: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
“He didn’t even chew. He just inhaled,” he said.
Crews find animals in the trash more often than anyone wants to admit. But Halverson wasn’t about to let this one become another sad statistic.
He drove the dog straight to the Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission himself. And after treatment and a short stint in foster care, he got first dibs to adopt.
He’d been thinking about a second dog anyway, so it was a match made in heaven.
He named him PJ – for the peanut butter and jelly that got them both through the worst morning of the dog’s life.
“God knows what he went through. And the fact that obviously he was in a garbage can, purposefully discarded. He was buried under garbage, and the fact that he was still super friendly,” Halverson said.
These days, PJ rides shotgun with the man who fished him out of the trash on the very same route he was found on.
