HERO DOG SURVIVES SANS PAW

SIKESTON -- When Pam Smith called Delbert Cobb to ask if he'd ever made an artificial limb for a dog, the answer was no. And no, the prosthetist didn't want to start now.

But after hearing how Tooshie had been injured -- heroically protecting Smith's children from a pit bull -- Cobb had to try.

The pit bull's iron jaws broke both of Tooshie's back legs last January, leaving the 9-year-old mixed-breed dog almost helpless.

Sikeston veterinarian Dr. David Morris amputated the end of one leg just below the joint, leaving an extra flap of skin. Normally a leg is amputated at a higher point, but Morris knew the other broken leg, already arthritic, was too weak to carry her whole rear end. And it refused to heal.

Tooshie was like a 63-year-old person whose bones don't knit as well as they once did, Morris said, adding: "I knew she'd have to have a prosthesis of some kind."

Morris tried but couldn't devise something himself.

After five surgeries and $2,000 in veterinarian bills, happy solutions to Tooshie's plight were evaporating until Smith found Cobb at Cape Prosthetics-Orthotics Inc. in Cape Girardeau.

"I'd been crying and crying for days," she said.

Tooshie's heroism, her lack of a third leg to stand on, and Morris' excellent amputation convinced Cobb to the job, even though he refused to accept any money for it.

The 4-inch-long, finger-like prosthesis is made of the same material a human prosthesis is made from -- rigid foam and acrylic lamination.

Tooshie was fitted with the prosthesis in March and mastered it quickly.

"She could barely walk before," Smith says. "Now she scratches her belly with it."

With the exception of children, few humans adapt to a prosthesis as easily as Tooshie has.

She runs behind the family's children just as she once did, though Smith and her husband, Michael, insist on keeping her in the yard now. The prosthetic paw is removed at night to rest Tooshie's leg.

Morris expects the other broken leg to heal now that Tooshie isn't walking on it. The dog has no other visible signs of the attack that day in January.

Smith's children, Brandon, 6, and Brooke, 3, and their grandmother, Shirley Smith, were walking in the field behind their house when the pit bull approached.

"I just thought it was a regular dog," Brandon recalls.

Tooshie, who always follows Brandon wherever he goes, immediately stepped between the children and the pit bull, which quickly had Tooshie at its mercy.

The children and their grandmother ran for the house, summoning help by phone. Five minutes later, Smith's stepfather, Gene Clayton, finally stunned the attacking dog with an iron bar.

"It scares me what could have happened to the children if she hadn't been there," Smith says.

Her children didn't sleep well afterward. "They were even scared to walk out into the yard," Smith said.

The Smiths didn't know the pit bull lived in the neighborhood until that day. It had escaped from a fenced yard.

The dog was destroyed by its owner.

It's a fate Tooshie's brown eyes were staring at, too, but Smith wouldn't give up.

"This dog protected my children," she said. "I thought I had to do everything I could.

"She's just like part of our family."