Weds 20th April: Can you give Chance a chance?

We urgently need a foster for this 3-legged dog

The other day I mentioned a three-legged dog that's waiting at AFCD in Sheung Shui, in the hope that someone would feel enough compassion to give him a chance.  The dog is only a year old and I don't know his story other than the leg had to be amputated, but he must be a very sweet-natured boy to have been picked out by the vet for re-homing.   I'm not sure of the exact number of dogs that enter each of the four Animal Management Centres or the percentage of those that are lucky enough to pass the assessment, but there are still thousands being killed every year with many of them only being deemed too old to be suitable, or maybe too scared or just too ugly.  I really don't know what the "suitable for re-homing" criteria are as it depends on the individual AFCD vets, although I have had a good few disagreements over the years about dogs that I have thought adoptable but who have failed to make the grade.

I know that there are dogs and puppies that realistically will never become pets and I learned that the hard way, by taking wild puppies home convinced that all they needed was a lot of love and human interaction to turn them into sweet and cuddly companions. In some cases, if you take puppies that are young enough and whose parents haven't been feral for generations, this can happen, but for the most part these puppies will at best be happy to live with you though they will never be fully domesticated.  I have plenty of these types at my home, and although there is definitely a bond of trust that has developed over the years, which in some cases has even extended to include being able to touch and even cuddle, that only applies to me, the primary caretaker.  Such dogs will always be suspicious of strangers and anything outside of their familiar surroundings and routine.

Cindy on our foggy walk the other day

Cindy was the first such puppy I took from AFCD back in 2004, and I have written about her several times but more with regard to her having had cancer and her amazing remission, if not full recovery. She's an old dog now for her size, and although she is still coming along for the long morning walks she struggles with steep hills as the muscles in her back legs are weakening.  She also finds it impossible to get out of the storm drains where rainwater collects and which the dogs use for cooling off, and over the past week or so I have had to haul her out several times when she's become stuck inside one of the concrete channels.  After having lived with me her entire life Cindy still hates to be touched and I respect her choice,  but trying to help her climb out of the drain is made doubly difficult by her insistence on backing away from me when I reach out to get hold of her collar to pull her up.

14 year-old Murphy also still enjoys the morning walks and cooling off in the rainwater catchments

Going back to the three-legged dog and the fact that he is definitely nothing like Cindy or any of the previous "mistakes" I have made, there is a chance that he might have fallen on his one-missing feet after I was contacted by a couple who are interested in meeting him.  They will do so on Friday when we take him out of AFCD, along with a corgi that is also coming to us.  However, even if they like him and agree to adopt there is a snag, and that is that they are from Canada and will be taking the dog with them when they fly back.  That's great of course, but they can't have a dog where they are staying in Hong Kong and will need to leave him with us until they return home.  That means that we need a short-term foster for the dog from this Friday, whether or not he is lucky enough to get a "yes".

If you can help, please let Cindy know by emailing foster@hongkongdogrescue.com and help give this boy a chance.  In fact I will call him Chance, to remind me that it's all every one of our dogs need.