Pachu and Enano

This is a true story, it happened to a friend of a friend of a friend of my cousin.

Well maybe I just wish that. It happened to me, and my family, but mainly me.

A couple of years ago, my sister moved away (the thing is, it took living 960km apart for us to really connect, but that's another story), a few weeks before the big day of moving out she called her dog a problem because she didn't know how to move with her, and even if she wanted to take her with. It took everything in me not to punch my beloved sister, so I took the dog from her. We bonded, she slept with me, trained with me and actually did everything (except waking me up in the mornings) with me. Her name was Kala and we lived happily ever after for a year.

She died unexpectedly, within one week of getting sick, we never knew what happened.

After a month or so I was coming home really late from my work as a waitress in a pub, and with maybe two or three beers in me. And there they were. Two mutts, barking from the inside of my house. My mum was on a trip so I was alone and I freaked out, how on earth did this dogs had gotten inside my house, and why they were barking at me. Dude, this is MY house.

I got them out, gave them some food and went to bed only to be woken up by a lady calling out from the sidewalk, because one of my dogs was outside and poor thing it may get lost if he doesn't get inside with his friend. I was half asleep and could barely talk but I managed to get outside and open the door for the dog. The other one was (as the lady had stated) already inside.

One of them was sick so we called him Pachu, which in spanish means absolutely nothing but we use it to convey that we don't feel so good. The other one is called Enano, this one you can look it up, means dwarf, or little, you can guess why.

I used to have happy dogs, raised from the time they were puppies, so trying to help adult dogs who had been neglected was hard but it all pays off. After a year one of them understood what playing meant. The other one catches balls (and brings them back, that's a new one), and they helped me rescue more dogs.

One of the dogs we rescued was actually found by these two. I was reading in my livingroom with my dogs when we heard a noise and they run outside as fast as they could, I heard them making weird noises, not their usual barks so I went to check and there was a puppy in pool of blood. Being an impressionable person I run inside to get my girlfriend and the keys to the car. We took the dog to the vet, she had been run over and left on the side to die, but the only thing really bad was her leg, it was almost destroyed. They told us that she would most likely loose the leg but we were not going to give up easily and so the Vet trained us in the first aid things we could do to make the recovery easier.

My dogs at first were a little reluctant to the new broken addition but after a couple of days we found the three of them sleeping in a not-so-big pile. We tried our best and slowly but surely we succeded in saving the leg, not that one less leg would have stopped that little, black dog. We would come home and she'd be on top of tables, chairs, anything but the floor really. She was really destructive (as most puppies are) until you put her on your lap, and then she would fall asleep almost instantly. Weeks went by and we started to try and find her a good home, three dogs in my house was a little too much. Only weird people answered our postings and we were losing hope. And out of nowhere a friend of a friend said "Now that the kids are old enough we wanted to get a dog", it was like angels singing, like the sound you hear in your head every time a ray of sunshine touches the face of your cat in a majestic way. Well, we meet with the family, the dog now called Lisi (short for Lisiada, spanish for crippled, you may have realised that we're not good with names) loved the little girl instantly, the couple were the most loving I ever met. So we scheduled a date and got ready to let go of this dog we had saved. It was really, really, really hard, but when we got to the house they had handpainted a wooden house only for the dog, had gotten a bed for inside if she was cold (we all know how that turned out) and the special food she needed to keep the recovery going. We stayed for a couple of hours and when dog and little girl were chasing each other in the garden we left, and cried the ride home.

A week later we got photos of this little dog with a new dog brother they had rescued, and a few months later more photos of the two dogs all grown up and big and sleeping with the little girl. It is a happy ending, in this weird times, we need to remember all the happy endings we have.

Nothing of this would have been possible if it wasn't for my sister saying stupid things and the love and empathy for dogs that Kala instilled in me. I believe that Kala said "This guys need help getting over me, go, help them." and this little, malnourished, neglected dogs took it as their mission to make us happier.

And that's the story of how I changed the lives of three dogs.

And even more, how those dogs changed my life.