A three-year-old girl from Tennessee, who was born without feet and some of her fingers, was given a puppy with a missing paw for a new companion.
Sapphyre Johnson suffered from a congenital condition that caused her to be born without feet and several fingers.
She has spent the past three months at the Shriner's Hospital for Children in Greenville, South Carolina with her mother, Ashley, after undergoing a series of operations in order to fit her with prosthetic feet.
While recuperating at the hospital, Sapphyre received a get-well-soon surprise when a dog breeder came to visit the little girl and gifted her with a nine-week-old white German shepherd puppy named Lt. Dan.
What's special about Lt. Dan is that the puppy also suffered from a lost limb, missing almost his entire right paw.
According to Ashley, a dog breeder had reached out to the hospital about wanting to donate a puppy that was missing one of its front paws. She said that the breeder wanted for the dog to grow up with a child who had a similar situation instead of having the dog be put down.
Sapphyre was shown a picture of the puppy and quickly fell in love with it.
Karen Riddle, the dog breeder who contacted the hospital, went to see Sapphyre and brought the puppy along with her.
"Very heartwarming knowing that he's going somewhere that he's going to have a child that will grow up with him and go to show-and-tell with," Riddle said. "Like she said when she first saw him - 'look mommy he's got a foot like mine!'"
Riddle explained that she named the puppy Lt. Dan after the character in the popular movie Forrest Gump, who lost his lower limbs during the Vietnam War.
"The movie is a heartwarming, loving story, so I said, 'You're just like Lt. Dan,'" Riddle recounted. "It just suited his personality." She said that the puppy was the only one missing a paw in a litter of nine German shepherds.
Riddle coordinated with the staff from the Shriner's Hospital for Children to make Lt. Dan a therapy dog for Sapphyre.
"A lot of kids don't see other children or animals that have issues like they have," Matthew Johnson, Sapphyre's father, said.
