Stigma joined the Big Pack in the Sky on September 15th, 2021.

She passed at 5 years old due to complications during surgery.

Stigma was born in January of 2016, and arrived at Wild Spirit in December of 2020. She was originally owned by a well-known wolfdog breeder in Indiana along with nearly 20 other animals. However, due to personal reasons, Stigma’s owner decided to move to a different state in which wolfdog ownership was illegal. As a result, she was forced to find new homes for all her animals.

While many of the animals in this person’s collection were highly sought-out due to their unique coloration or other desirable traits, some of the older or less social animals were unwanted. This included Stigma, who her owner attempted to find a private home for, but she garnered no interest as a pet, likely as a result of her shy nature. As such, Wild Spirit reached out to offer her a home, where we hoped she might be a good match for one of our single males.

Soon after agreeing to rescue Stigma, her owner then offerred to surrender another, more senior, wolfdog named Mika. We agreed, knowing we had plenty of single males in need of companionship, and due to both being stated to have a lack of socialbility. Following the decision to take in both females, we made the trip from New Mexico to Indiana to pick them up and bring them home.

Shortly after arrival, Stigma was paired with one of our low-content woldogs, Kenai. Unfortunately, their relationship did not get to blossom for long, due to Stigma’s tragic passing during one of our routine vet visits. Stigma was scheduled for her spay surgery and for a tissue sample collection as she had been struggling with retaining weight despite our best efforts during the previous months. While under for her surgery our vet showed us a number of abnormalities he had found inside her body, including a number of small imbedded granules in her intestines, a few of which were removed for biopsy. During this brief examination after her spay surgery had been completed, Stigma’s vitals suddenly dropped. Our amazing vet and his assistant did everything they could to recover Stigma, but she sadly passed.

We decided to do some more exploratory surgery to see if we could discover a cause for what went wrong and found some more abnormalities including some lesions on her spleen and other internal abnormalities that would not have been seen without further investigation. We decided to send Stigma for a necropsy to hopefully gain some more answers as to what went wrong, and her results were heartbreaking to say the least.

It came back that she had a very bad case of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which we had expected and had been taking a tissue sample to confirm during her surgery. She also had aspiration pneumonia, meaning that ingesta of some sort had aspirated into her lungs, as well as cardiac dilation and cardiomyopathy (cardiac disease); something that we would have never been able to diagnose until it was too late, like in Stigma’s case.