When a trembling dog was placed in my arms in the early hours of a December Saturday I was not too concerned by her terrified state. After all, I knew about rescue dogs. Cabbage, our lovely collie cross who had died at the beginning of the year, had come from a Dogs Trust rescue centre 15 years earlier, and had also been pretty nervous at first. I was confident that Sophie, a one-year-old of indeterminate breed (but with a lot of German shepherd), brought to us on a van from Romania, would, like Cabbage, quickly settle down in her new home. How wrong I was.
Our new dog seemed frightened of my wife and I, and our house, and desperately searched for the smallest space she could find, eventually settling behind a sofa. The next morning, I was keen to restart the early dog walks which had been a key feature of my exercise regime since I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2019. But Sophie was going nowhere.
