When Ashley, a pit bull, was discovered in an abandoned Staten Island home last month she was malnourished with cigarette burns on her head, but she still looked happy. Now, after settling in to her new home inside a Lower East Side firehouse, this pup has even more to wag her tail at.
Ashley was found on Jan. 9 in a home in Port Richmond after someone called Erica Mahnken, a co-founder of No More Pain Rescue. The windows were broken, there was no food or water, and the house was freezing, she said.
But Ashley “came running down the stairs,” said Mahnken, 30. “Her tail was wagging, really happy. She jumped right in my car.”
The abandoned dog weighed about 20 pounds — about 25 pounds less than she should.
The rescue group, which works as a foster, hadn’t made plans on where to bring Ashley before running to get her. That’s when Mahnken thought her friends, firefighters at a lower Manhattan FDNY station nicknamed “Fort Pitt” on Pitt Street (the home of Engine 15, Ladder 18, Battalion 4).
“We knew that they were looking into adopting a dog,” she said. “As soon as we walked in with her, her tail was wagging, everybody was coming over to see her. She jumped up, she was kissing everybody. Just super sweet.”
Three days later, the firehouse decided to officially adopt the lovable dog. Now, weighing about 50 pounds, Ashley lives a much-deserved life of being loved and spoiled, and even has her own Instagram account to boot.
“There’s so many people there all the time. She gets taken out like 30 times a day, whoever is there,” said Mahnken. “Their smaller runs that they go on they bring her — she has her own little seat in the fire truck.”
Online, Ashley does indeed look like she’s living the life, with many photos posted of her playing or lounging with different firefighters. The resilient pup is known on Instagram as “probyash,” a nod to the firefighter term “probie,” or probationary firefighters.
“From the crackhouse to the firehouse,” her account reads. “Life is good.”
