Meeting With a Stray Dog

[cass.]

Oh! I can see her! (the pictures) She truly does look like a jackal-the name Jackie really suits her. I'm stalking this thread....
-Banjo2345
you really are animalobsessed XD

[animalobsessed1]

I thought my dad only wanted to put her back on the streets for that one day, but apparently he was planning on doing this every day. So on Thursday morning we took her back to school again, and the last thing I saw of her was when she jumped out of the car. I haven´t seen her since then.
After school I walked around for quite some time to look for her, but I was unable to find her. In the evening my dad drove my brother to a classmate´s house, and on the way there, you drive past the school. So I decided to come along and look for the dog again, but I still couldn´t find her.
It was already dark by the time I got home (without doggy ), and there were some of the stray cats lounging around outside. (Have I mentioned the stray cats around here before?) So I tried giving them the dog food I had intended to use to lure my little doggy, and they ate it! So then I decided to go up to the apartment and get a handful of dog food for them. (Because I get depressed when I´m not around animals.) It probably wouldn´t be very healthy for them if I fed them with dog food every day, but I don´t think one handfull will hurt.
When I came back down there were three of them there. I call them:

The Lion- This one just looks so much like a lion, even though it has normal cat colors. The head shape is like a lion, and the cat is really muscular (and rather big for a cat). I haven´t been able to touch him/her (I can´t tell the difference with cats), but he lets me get pretty close. Up to one meter.

Friendly Kitty- This one is not quite right in the head, but I still like him/her. Whenever we leave in the morning, he follows us to the car, purring. He comes running when you sit down and hold out your hand to him. Then he just purrs and rubs against you, but the moment you start trying to pat him, he gets aggressive. He scratched me when I tried to pat him, then went back to purring as if nothing had happened. Another girl told me that he bit her when she tried to touch him. I still like this little kitty though, after all, you don´t have to touch an animal in order to enjoy their company. In the wild, they wouldn´t do it to each other either.

Flat-face- (As the name suggests,) this one´s face is kind of flat compared to that of the other cats, though it´s not as flat as some purebred cats. He/she has the tips of his ears missing, so he kind of looks like an American Curl cat. Last time I walked Wufi, I had to chase this one away because they were looking at each other in a rather aggressive way, and I was scared that they would fight. I don´t know if this is the reason or if this cat is just naturally the most shy of them all.

Friendly Kitty immediately started eating out of my hand, but the other two kept their distance. It´s kind of funny, cats seem to have more difficulty eating out of people´s hands than dogs. He kept biting and licking my fingers instead of the food.
For the other two, I had to throw the food at them, which kind of made me feel like I was feeding furry, four legged pigeons. Towards the end, I did manage to get The Lion to eat out of my hand by laying my hand completely on the floor and keeping very still. (I like taming animals, in South Africa I managed to get wild guinea fowls to trust me enough to touch them. For weeks I went out for hours at a time each day, and just stayed as close to them as I could get until they got used to me. I even learned to tell some of them apart.)

Anyways, yesterday we went looking for Wufi again, but we couldn´t find her. It´s really sad, because if my dad hadn´t insisted on taking her back, I would have had a whole weekend that I could have spent with her, teaching her her name, to walk on a leash, and getting her socialized. I was actually starting to hallucinate. (Talk about obsessed!) Every time there was movement, I was like "There she is! I found her!" Then I looked more closely and there was nothing there.

Yeah, I think I´m going to just keep calling her Wufi, because she started responding to that name.

[sunny*days*ahead]

Oh no! D:
I hope you find the sweet girl soon.
It looks like you two are a great match, and hopefully she will come back soon.
Best of luck ♥

[bangarain]

I hope your baby comes home soon ;3;.

[jay,]

I hope you find your doggie.

[animalobsessed1]

Today during our sports lesson she came back again, but of course the stupid teacher told me to leave her alone and participate. Wufi looked even worse than before. She had a whole lot of fur missing, as if she had gotten into a fight. It´s pretty hard for me to imagine her in a fight though, because she pretty much runs away from every living (and nonliving) thing. So I thought that it might just be my imagination. When everybody started running laps, she got scared and dissappeared again.
I felt like crying, for two reasons:
1. I had finally found her, but then lost her again.
2. It was my fault for being stupid enough to listen to the teacher!

Then the teacher allowed us to go for a "one mile run" (I´m from Germany and have no clue how much a mile actually is) outside of the school grounds. Obviously, most people preferred to stay at school and play volleyball or swim in the pool, but I was hoping that I would see her on the way, so I went. Also, this was the only way to get out of the teacher´s sight. Sadly, I didn´t find her.
Instead, I saw the bitch I had growled at before. (I already apologized to her the last time I saw her.) This dog was with the people who considered themselves to be her owners. Obviously the dog doesn´t agree, as she followed me when she saw me, despite the people calling her to come back. Well, the dog followed me all the way back to school, where she then stayed for a while. I hid behind the school building, (where the teacher couldn´t see me) and stroked her for a while. When I felt something hard, I looked to see what it was, and it was a huge crust of blood, right at her throaght! It was already starting to come off, so I could see the actual size of the wound: It was bigger than one of her paws. This is when I started getting really scared for little Wufi. The marks I mentioned earlier are on her face and chest. This is a pretty good indication that she wasn´t running away when she got them.
Incase you´re wondering what the other dog looks like, she looks a lot like a blue heeler or australian cattledog (not sure where the difference is), except that she is the size of a big chihuahua, and that her ears are more to the side and not as triangular.
She looks similar to these:
http://www.kulnaracattledog.com/wp-cont ... c01402.jpg
http://lostandfoundpetsamerica.com/wp-c ... 00x280.jpg
However, she has more brown shimmering through than those two do, and her hip bones are jutting out due to being underweight.

Luckily I then saw Wufi through the fence. I called her name and she wagged her tail. So I secretly left school grounds and walked in her direction until she was only a few meters away. Then I called her name again and she came. So now I know for sure that she knows her name. I patted her for a while, then stood up, called her name again, and started walking back to school. She followed me, happily wagging her tail.
When school ended, I was scared to go inside to get my bag because I didn´t want her to leave again. So I waited until my dad arrived, then put her in the car and told him why he had to go get my bag instead of me.
Because the girl who offered to take care of our dogs while we are in Germany is the same girl who is living practically next to us, we took her home too, with Wufi sitting in the middle. She said that she guessed that Wufi was about six or seven years old, and I thought that she was joking, but apparently she was serious. I told her that I was pretty sure that she is no older than two years. She pointed out the "grey hair" on her muzzle to explain why she thought the dog must be an old dog. I told her that it was just a really light brown, and showed her that Wufi has the same color on her chest and paws. After I showed her Wufi´s beautiful white teeth, we both agreed that she was definately a young dog, and that the vet would probably be able to make a more accurate guess.

[bangarain]

YAY for Wufi!! I hope she's okay, and that the other dog (Have you named her? And Heelers and Cattle Dogs are the same thing; "Blue Heelers" and "Red Heelers" is just a nickname, since they herd by nipping heels, and most are blue ticked or red ticked 8D)is alright as well!! I look dorward to seeing your updates on Wufi and get really excited when I see a new post. XD

[sunny*days*ahead]

So you got her back!? 8D
YAY! Im so happy for you! Maybe she will thrive in your hands, out of danger.
Give her some love from all of us on CS (:

[MoonfallTheFox]

Glad you found her.

I have seen some ancient dogs with perfect teeth (13! and neglected, but clean and white teeth. His coat on the other hand was horrible.), but my dog, even though I've tried brushing, we had them prfessionally cleaned, etc- have tons of plaque on them along the gums.

[animalobsessed1]

She´s really starting to get more confident now. Yesterday when we came home she was lying on my bed, but immediately came over to greet us. Then she peed on the floor, while wagging her tail and not even going into the peeing position. (She´s done this before, in the car, and I was stupid enough to tell my dad. Obviously, he threw a completely pointless fit.) So this time I was planning on not telling him and then just cleaning it up in secret. Of course, that didn´t work out either, because my stupid brother had to go and tell my dad, even though I specifically told him not to. So then my dad threw another completely pointless fit and told me to clean it up.
Then we went to go buy some dog stuff: a new leash (because my dad tried to walk her while I was at school and he somehow managed to get her to poo on the leash), anti flea dog shampoo, flea and tick collar, a brush, and some wet dog food. Except for the leash, I paid for everything with my pocket money.
When we got back, my dad told me to wash her with the newly bought dog shampoo. I told him that that would traumatize her. He said didn´t care, and that she stunk (I didn´t smell anything though). So I procrastinated for as long as possible by trying to get her used to being in the shower (there are no bathtubs in this strange country). I put food in there and then put her in too. Then I walked out again and she followed me. On the second attempt she jumped in on her own. So I fed her about three handfulls of dry food by making her come in, giving her some of the food, making her come out again, making her come in again, etc.
This is why I don´t like small dogs. If I gave her as many treats as I wanted to, she would go from being underweight to being overweight within two weeks. With my other dog, a few handfulls would make absolutely no difference. So after I gave her three handfulls of it, I couldn´t procrastinate any longer. Of course, little Wufi completely shut down and just stood there, shaking. Because, we are in this awesome country, the warm water had issues and I had to wash her with cold water.
I knew she had ticks, but before this, I had absolutely no idea just how bad it was. In South Africa we once walked out dogs in a wonderful place with loads of beautiful, long, green grass. When we got home, I found seven ticks on one of them. I was like "Wow! Those are a lot of ticks!" And we never walked there again. With Wufi, I was expecting to find only ten ticks on her. Well, that was the amount of ticks she had on just one of her paws. (Hiding between the toes.) She reminded me of some show I had once watched on Animal Planet where they went in and rescued dogs from a puppy mill. The dogs there had so many ticks that, in some places, when they parted the fur, the skin wasn´t even visible because there was just such a dense layer of ticks.

During walks she is [almost] acting like a normal dog (that hasn´t been trained) now. I no longer need to lure her by giving her food after every two steps. (I still take a few with me though, just in case.)
Remember how I said she was lying in my bed? Well, before I went to bed, I decided to check if any of them had fallen off. I found about thirty of them (I stopped counting at twenty). So, because it was getting late, I just decided to sleep in the spare room and take care of that problem the next day. So I was really buisy yesterday and didn´t even have the time to switch my computer on in the first place, and I couldn´t even watch a single episode of Beelzebub, Code Geass, or Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji) . There was a time when I used to watch ten episodes in one day!
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Today she peed on the floor again when we came home. I think she does it out of nervousness. I started trying to teach her to sit on command, because I want her to get used to the idea of perfoming certain behaviors on cue, and sit is a simple one to start with. Even though I taught my dog over fourty different words, I have actually never taught any dog to sit before. Why? Because that was always the one and only thing they knew when I got them. Wufi hasn´t completely understood yet, but she does sit when I say "sit" and then touch her with my finger to gently push her down. I tried the method that seems to be so popular with people who consider touching an animal during training to be abusive. You know, where you lure the dog into a sit position with the treat? Well, she got really frightened when I did that because she knew that I wanted something from her, but had absolutely no clue what exactly it was that I wanted. This just proves my theory that it is a lot less cruel to use physical force than it is to let the animal figure out what you want from it. Especially when you have an animal that actually wants to please you.

Then the other girl (I mentioned her before, but I don´t want to mention any names) who lives here came over with one of her dogs. We wanted to try having that dog show Wufi how to act on a leash, and also to socialize her with other dogs and people. Strangely, she was actually more nervous, even though she seemed to get along great with the other dog, and even wagged her tail and sniffed him.