Wish is a three year old German Shepherd cross. Wish has been with us for two years now. When she arrived with us we affectionately referred to her as our resident wild child, as she really did know nothing about manners or etiquette. I remember the day after she arrived whilst drinking a coffee with Debbie in my kitchen, the next thing I knew she had jumped up on my kitchen worktop and was running along it to stand behind me…. this is a big dog to be surfing around your worktops. It wasn’t an easy start with her. She bonded with me very quickly and was so desperate to please but she didn’t have a clue about anything much at all really and I was forever exasperated by her. Eventually we made some progress and she learnt what she needed to know but the abuses of her past ran deep and there were ghosts that visited her that I wondered if they would ever stop impacting on her chances for a home.
When Wish was found in Romania she had an angry and excessively large spay wound that was severely infected and she was very poorly. She had been spayed by, well we will call him an uncaring, but that doesn’t cover it!vet. This vets practise was to neuter the strays and return them to the street immediately before they even regained consciousness. These dogs were all vulnerable to infection but even more vulnerable to being attacked by other hungry street dogs whilst they were not fully conscious. The dogs were not treated kindly before the op and stood little chance of survival after it but the practise fulfilled all that was required of the neuter and release law of that time. It most certainly had left more than a physical mark on Wish and she had an inbuilt fear of men that proved difficult to shift.
In addition to the barbarity of her spay it soon transpired that she actually wasn’t spayed effectively and she came into season whilst in our care. We had her re-spayed by a ‘proper’ vet here in the UK and actually that made a big difference to her behaviour. It could very well be that whatever procedure they callously carried out also played havoc with her hormones thus exacerbating her ‘wild child’ behaviour. I am happy to say we are now two years down a very long and expensive track and our girl has come good. I read her old album today and its just not true anymore, she has changed so much and is now a real beauty. I would still like to see her go to someone with experience of large breeds that will continue to put more training into her but yesterday we walked her off lead in a pack of 11 dogs she had never met before and 8 humans she had also never met and you know what? She was the best behaved there! She walked off lead amongst the group, returned to me pretty much each time I called her, walked past strangers with only a passing sniff. She played beautifull with the other dogs, backed off when they told her to and I absolutely fell in love with her all over again.
My wish for Wish now is a home of her own, there might still be some rough edges but you know what, she has a heart of gold and lets face it her life has been pretty rubbish so far, its time she had a change of luck!
from WordPress https://whitneypierce123.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/wish-3-year-old-female-german-shepherd-cross/
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