Hugo Leiza and his roommates’ emotions got the best of them when they heard about a half-starved puppy chained up in a backyard a few blocks from their Miami house.

They were going to just kidnap him. Whatever the consequences are.

They began by heading over to the residence in the Liberty City neighborhood with some food and drink.

The dog was chained to a tree in the soil, his ribs holding up his drooping skin like a tattered tent.

When they appeared, he barked but gradually allowed them approach closer. When they placed some food down, the dog ate it all.

The residents of the residence arrived at that very moment.

“We raced out of the backyard, walked around the front, and talked to them,” he tells The Dodo.

“What’s the deal with the dog?” Leiza enquired of the locals.

“It’s my nephew’s dog,” said the resident. “When he moved out three months ago, he left the dog behind.”

And thus the voyage of a dog named Ganesh, after the Hindu god famed for clearing barriers and delivering riches, started.

It’s a suitable moniker for a dog that had his first and most pitifully significant impediment removed last week – a rope that hadn’t left his neck in months.

“He was so delighted simply to be able to walk and even run for the first time in who knows how long,” Alex Carvalho says in a video released on YouTube by the pals.

You should have been there that day for the fortune.

They gave him a bath and “scrubbed him down really good.”

He got a coconut oil treatment.

He got hugs. He found love.

And he gave it all back in spades.

They made contact with animal control. They did not submit a report, however, since they were unsure what would happen to Ganesh. Instead, they contacted Good Karma Pet Rescue.

“They know a lot more about this than we do,” Leiza remarks. “They frequently rescue dogs.”

Ganesh will be able to find a permanent home thanks to the rescue. He has a plethora of veterinarian visits ahead of him for the time being. He’ll be eligible for adoption after he’s recovered from his illness.

But he won’t be at the end of some forgotten rope till then. He’ll be living with his four rescuers, Alex Carvalho, Hugo Leiza, Ste Hernandez, and Alejandro Valencia.

Friends have set up a GoFundMe campaign to seek money for Ganesh’s rehabilitation and, as they put it, to keep him “happy and free for all his doggie years.”