The adventure begins

 

It was the beginning of summer 2009, when a friend spotted 7 puppies in a park in Ghent. In a group email, she shared with us their urgent need for finding good homes. I helped to share their story to increase their chances to find loving homes. For us, at that time, adopting a dog was out of the question, not only due to our hectic lives, but our house rent contract prohibited tenants from having pets.
The puppies had been born in a tiny studio, where a Polish girl was dog-sitting a German Shepherd, actually her boyfriend’s dog, for the past months. To everyone’s surprise, the dog was pregnant, and they had no clue who the father could have been. This lady was almost never home, studying and working hard. She had barely time to take the puppies’ mother for a walk on a daily basis. Her studio was in chaos, no one in the building could get some sleep, as the dogs were howling day and night. After repeated complaints from her neighbours, she felt obliged to take action.

At the eminence of the pups being dumped at the public shelter, I promptly and impulsively offered to foster them, in the hopes to find them forever home-sweet-homes. I would take all the puppies for whom she could not find homes, and I would make sure each of them got the best possible family.

It was unthinkable to me that young puppies would be left to their own devices in a cold and hard floor on a crowded animal shelter, without getting proper attention, feeding routine, training, hygienic conditions. The list could go on and on.

The first weeks are crucial to favorable development of a pup. Whatever they experience and learn in their first two or three months will impact their behaviour as grown-up dogs. There are countless rules of etiquette that a dog must master to comply with the demands of our civilised” society. They should get, in their first two or three months at least a sample of various different situations they might experience in the future. They should be able to socialise with all types of dogs, get used to hard noises, such as fireworks, learn to ask to go potty, not jump on people or on other dogs, not bite, not destroy things… a lot of “not-tos.”

That’s how I ended up with three furballs in my life that summer.