Abandoned and aggressive... now my Angel

As I have blogged about before and shared in a similar post here, it's my belief that an aggressive dog is usually not truly aggressive. An seemingly aggressive dog only growls or barks because it it either very frightened and wants to protect itself, or trying to protect something else like the owner or its home. This is particularly true of house pets or strays, which are not trained to attack people. For guard dogs, however, don't play around, coz' they are trained to be really aggressive. Another experience I had recently proves my theory.

One morning a couple of weeks ago which happened to be a weekend, my lovely weekend slumber was disrupted by an early morning phone call from a frantic lady saying stuff in Chinese. Due to the fact that I am a banana who can't speak Chinese to save my life, I only understood that she was having a problem with a dog and needed my help to remove it. I presume she got my number from somewhere I posted online regarding some animals I was trying to rehome and she thought I do this animal rescue stuff on a regular basis (which I don't by the way. I have a full time job that keeps me pretty busy!). So anyway, I asked my mum to call and find out what the story was. And it turns out, the son of the women who called me has brought home a dog that was given to him by his friend who asked him to take care of the dog for a while and later he would take her back. But this guy had no intention of taking the dog back and later told his gullible friend that he could just 'throw away' the dog.

So what happened was that the dog went into one of the rooms of the family and growled at anyone who came in. They got so scared, no one dared to go into that room for fear of her attacking, hence why they called me and disturbed my beauty sleep.

So the evening of that same day, my mum and I went over to their place which was a flat, met the young man and his mother. And my mum spoke to them to find out the whole story, got the contact number of the guy who dumped the dog pon them, and did what she does best, which was call the guy and give him an earful on how irresponsible he was for dumping the dog. In the meantime, I was left with the dirty work of actually having to try and convince the frightened dog that I was of no harm and pick her up without losing a limb or some fingers to her. I found her looking like this.

And yes, she was actually growling when I got closer. So I had to sit down, slowly inch my way closer while talking to her calmly, and sloooowly moved my hand closer to pet her. The closer my hand got, the more her teeth showed, but eventually she let me pet her. After a little while of petting and talking and one attempt of her trying to snap at my hand, I managed to get a collar and chain on her, and also got her to roll over so I could give her a belly rub.

It was at this point when I knew she had trusted me, so I managed to pick her up easily and took her out, much to the joy of the family that called me. We then took her to the vet where we got her spayed and boarded for a few days, after which when I picked her up, I had to go through the whole cycle of getting her relaxed again to pick her up because she was again frightened and growling at me after being stuck a few days at the vet with many noisy and probably equally frightened dogs. When I took her home, she was also aggressive with my dog, who is actually a friendly fella who was just trying to be friends with her.

Initially, I wanted to put her up for adoption, but after a few days, I noticed her getting very attached to me. When around other new people, she'd be agitated, but with me, she was happy. I treated her like my own dog, let her into my house, and she followed me around everywhere and also likes licking my leg as a sign of affection. The best part is that she doesn't chew stuff and she hardly poops or pees in the house if I take her out regularly (there were a couple of accidents, but that was mostly my fault for not letting her out even though she clearly wanted to go out). She also quickly became very friendly with my dog.I'd feel pretty bad to give her away now, since she's been abandoned once and is now so attached to me and my dog, I don't want her to feel abandoned again. So I've decided to keep her and I named her Angel. 

 
It goes to show that her initial aggressive behaviour was simply due to her fear of being in a new environment, and after some care, she showed that she's actually quite a fantastic and loving dog. I have no idea why her owner decided to dump her, but then again, there are really too many idiotic people in this world who don't know how to recognise or appreciate the good things they have in life. 

And that's why, people, never judge a dog by it's cover or it's seemingly aggressive behaviour. The first time she saw me, she almost tried to snap at me. Now look how we are. :)

  

Abandoned and aggressive... now my Angel