With the holidays come designer chocolate gift baskets, tasty treats and an increased risk of pets getting sick from eating them.

It's a situation the Hall County Animal Shelter is faced with more often than not. One of its most recent cases is a young puppy named Cindy, who arrived in November.

"She was an owner surrender, which means the people that had her brought her into the shelter. They said that she had eaten some rat poisoning and could not afford to take her to a vet," said Cindy Langman, program coordinator at the shelter. "She was pretty ill."

Rat poison is another danger dogs face in winter, as more homeowners use it to deter rodents from coming into their warm houses.

"Rat poison causes the body not to clot, so you just start bleeding out everywhere. She'd lost so much blood, her gums were ghost white," said Meghan Seabolt, veterinarian at the shelter.

"They were the whitest I'd ever seen. ... She was pouring blood from her nose and it was all over the little cardboard box she was in. She should have been dead on arrival, but she was still sitting up and wagging her little tail. With as good as she looked, she deserved a chance."

Cindy was immediately started on a regimen of vitamin K, which reverses the effects of the rat poison. When Seabolt saw the puppy was going downhill, she decided a blood transfusion was necessary.

When doing a canine blood transfusion — taking the blood from one animal and giving it to another, just like in humans — the veterinarian is supposed to make sure blood types are compatible first, but the shelter didn't have the piece of equipment necessary. So Seabolt went on a hunch, using blood from her own dog, Bailey, a hound-lab mix.

"You take the blood from the donor animal, put it in a special blood collection system and you transfer it back into the recipient," she said.

Seabolt did two transfusions for Cindy, putting only 12 cc of blood in each time because she was so small.

"Within 12 hours of the first transfusion, she looked 100 times better. Her gum color was already starting to come back, but you could tell she needed a little more umph," she said. "Within probably three days after the second transfusion she was almost back to normal."

Seabolt took Cindy home with her that weekend and kept her hooked up to an IV in her bathtub. By Sunday afternoon, she was well enough to be taken off, though Seabolt kept her on the vitamin K for several more weeks.

Situations like Cindy's happen often at the shelter. Langman said the shelter takes in between 700 and 800 dogs and cats every month, a number of which are surrendered by the owners after the animals got sick or poisoned.

"Our shelter kind of goes above and beyond what most municipal shelters are allowed to do," Seabolt said. "We've done leg amputations, eye removals, anything that it takes to get them adopted if we think they're a good candidate."

And Cindy, while still experiencing some growing pains from her puppyhood, is considered to be one.

She's being fostered by Angels Among Us rescue group and is up for adoption, Langman said.

"She's doing amazing," Seabolt said. "She's just a very active little puppy, and you'd never know anything had happened to her."