A DOG owner has made a desperate appeal to raise £3,000 – to save her puppy's life.

Emma Dingley and partner Liam need the cash to fund an operation on five-month-old Blue merle Border Collie Cole's liver.

The pair, of Halliwell Road, were ecstatic when Cole was born but things quickly deteriorated for them after Cole started showing signs of illness.

Then nearly two months after he was born Emma and Liam's fears were confirmed when vets found a liver shunt, a blood vessel that carried blood around the liver instead of through it, in the young pup.

And things quickly got worse after the insurance company said the policy didn't begin until Cole was eight weeks, just one week later.

Emma, who works for the RSPCA, said: "It was early on that I knew something was wrong with him. He was walking into walls, falling over, he kept slathering and then one morning he went into a seizure. We took him to the vets and they did these tests on him and they confirmed he had a liver shunt.

"The condition is a liver abnormality which means he can't process any kind of food so he has to be on a special diet, which we thought was working to manage the condition with some medication we were given for him but then that stopped working and he couldn't stand up properly and he's been like that since."

Emma said the situation had been made worse for the pair because they had already built themselves up to put Cole down once before only for a vet recommended a diet to suddenly improve the situation.

She added: "When he was nine weeks old. He was really bad and we decided it wasn't fair for him to live like that and we decided to put him down. We took him back home for a final week with us and took him on his first walk and he had an ice cream and Chill Factore let us go in there and play in the snow, then on the Thursday one of the vets called and recommended this diet, so we tried it and it worked really well and we decided not to go through with it so it's just awful seeing him from when he was born to deciding to put him to sleep - I was really just counting down the days and asking am I doing the right thing because he was so ill - then to see him get better to now see him getting worse it's been terrible.

"That's why I want to try and raise the money for the surgery because I just feel I'll regret it if I don't."

The couple have managed to raise more than £340 so far. To donate go to https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/emma-dingley