My little rat dog

As she curls up on my lap (not bothered by the laptop currently on it) and makes herself comfy, I look down at her little face and wonder how anyone could ever want to hurt her; how can people have it in them to lay a harmful hand on these little furry friends? Not wanting to think about some of the horrors out there though, I want to tell you the story of how we found this little one…

Going back two summers now we took this tiny one in off the streets of Murcia, Spain. It was actually my boyfriend her found her; he jumped in front of a car to stop it from running over her! Not wanting to ramble on too much, the long and the short of it is that apparently there were a couple of men rooting through the rubbish containers and when asked if the dog belonged to them they said she was given to them but they didn’t want her as they lived on the streets. After being called, I came down to assist and to try get a hold of the dog.

It took us around half an hour to get her up to our flat. Being so small and delicate, she looked absolutely petrified; clearly the poor thing didn’t know what we were trying to do. We had treats, a dog lead and we were slowly trying to get a grab on her so we could get her away from the streets. Although she is a minute thing, she has a good set of teeth on her…which we learnt early on!

It wasn’t her fault of course; whatever had happened to her before (which I try not to think about) meant that she was extremely skittish, very nervous around men. We also found out that she had a quite a set of high pitched lungs on her! Whenever anyone came to visit the flat, she would hide away under a table or behind any piece of furniture and she was extremely yappy.

At first, we thought about trying to find her a new home. We took a few photos, put them up and sent messages on facebook, but nobody seemed to want her. After visiting the vet and tracking down a contact number and email for the owners connected with her identity chip, we were a little concerned because nobody responded to our messages. She had actually been micro-chipped in Belgium, so goodness knows how she ended up in Spain! The weeks went by and I fell in love with her; I decided that I wanted to keep her. Although she wasn’t too keen on new people, she had warmed very quickly to my too pups – Bruno and Lola –  who equally took a liking to her.

I’m glad we I made the decision to bring her into my puppy family, she’s ever so small and when she isn’t yapping, she really is no bother at all. I think she is ridiculously cute, in spite of her scraggy hair and white beard (ha!) And being so small, she sometimes scurries around like a skimpy rat. She often climbs up onto my lap, pawing at my face asking for a little bit of love and I look down at her and I think about how glad I am that we found her, rescued her and gave her (hopefully) a very happy life.