A simple surgery leaves a family's new puppy fighting for her life. It happened at the Lied Animal Foundation and News 3 Investigators know it's not the first time. The first time we reported a botched surgery at the Animal Foundation was when a family took their lab to be neutered, and the dog died as a result of veterinary malpractice. This time there's a happier ending, but the problem hasn't gone away.

There's no denying it. When you bring a new puppy into your family, you bring excitement, love, and when you get it from the Lied Animal Foundation, you're also saving a life. "We decided to get our son a dog and wanted to do a good thing, so we went to the shelter and found Shiloh and brought her home."

But the Tuck family didn't get to keep their baby Border Collie mix at home for very long. "Her stomach started to get bigger and bigger, and started turning into, like, a balloon." So they took Shiloh to Lone Mountain Animal Hospital, one of the Animal Foundation's recommended vets, and learned something had gone wrong with her spay.

"It was causing her to have a stomach full of fluid. She was coughing up blood and they said if we hadn't caught it it time that she could have died." She had to undergo three surgeries after doctors found four to five inches of Shiloh's small intestine had been sewn into her spay incision at the Animal Foundation. "Poor baby, what a sad little face."

Finally home after two weeks at the vet, the Tuck's vet bill was nearly $2500. They went to the Animal Foundation to see if they could get help paying it. "They wouldn't take responsibility for it at all. We didn't even get a sorry from them. So, it was just, they said, accidents happen."

An accident Lied wouldn't pay for. In a written statement, the Animal Foundation says, "The Tuck's ignored a contract they signed with us and took their dog to their own veterinarian and made their own arrangements rather than bringing it back to the shelter where it likely would have been sent to one of our dozens of outside veterinarians for immediate care. When they ignored their agreement, they incurred the resulting costs."

But the Tucks took Shiloh directly to one of the Animal Foundation's outside veterinarians, listed on Lied's own paperwork. As for bringing her back to the shelter first, "We didn't want to bring her back to the shelter because whoever, whatever vet had done it at the shelter, we didn't want her back in the same hands. We were afraid that, number one, they would never tell us what really happened, and number two, if it was too in depth, that they might put her down and we definitely didn't want that to happen."

In fact, the shelter director admitted the Animal Foundation is not medically equipped to handle the type of surgery Shiloh had to undergo to fix their vet's mistake. "It was carelessness, something that they say is so simple and standard and what they did to her was unbelievable." So now the happy times with a healthy puppy will have to make up for the sting of a big bill. "It makes us feel that even when people try to do something good, they don't seem to care."

Although no one from the Animal Foundation would go on camera, we did speak with Center Director Ernie Chambers on the phone. He says what happened to the Tuck's puppy was the second time a spay/neuter surgery has been botched like that in less than a year. He says they're planning on putting some training in place to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Animal Foundation also says, in order to reduce animal suffering, they spay or neuter virtually every animal they offer for adoption. They claim to have successfully performed more than 165,000 of those surgeries. The Tuck's were told that on the day of Shiloh's surgery, more than 60 animals were spayed or neutered, which in an eight hour day, means an average of one surgery every eight minutes.