11 years ago I was working with the blue cross in sheffield, they had a 3 week waiting list for dogs to get a place there so my job was to foster them until a place came up. In total I had 18 sets of dogs (groups of pups are counted as one set) go through my house and at one point I had 9 of them - 4 were found in the morning tied to our front door, the blue cross ended up relaxing the rules and took them the next day.
99% of them were 1-1 1/2 year old Japanese akita cross Alsatian, now these are a particularly difficult cross breed as as soon as they hit puberty the wolf (akita is a primitive breed) takes over and unless you know exactly what you are doing they push too hard and you lose any control over them. Sadly if this happens than they get classified on book-in as unable to re-homed/dangerous and are put to sleep, so the work we did with them to try and give them a chance in the three weeks we had was vital.
Then one day we had a knock on the door, local chav said that his "mate" had a litter of four puppies and he was going to drown them in the river if they were not re-homed. We go down there but he has already given away the three nice looking ones (border collie cross some rat thing) and there was only this tiny runty rat left. I said to him that if any of them were returned I would have them.
This rat thing was so tiny, her eyes were barely open and the umbilical cord was still there, I put her inside my coat to keep her warm and spent the night feeding her baby milk with a pipette. The next morning we had a knock on the door and there was chav with a pup, I was told he refused to eat dog food and cried all night long. I took him in.
A month of carrying puppies round in my coat later we named them Penny and Oreo and soon they were ready for re homing, which was a real wrench after what we had been though to keep them alive. In the end my parents agreed to take them in.
Oreo
Penny
Few days ago Penny started panting and they found a lump on her neck, she didn't respond to the anti-inflammatories and was distressed, so this morning she was put to sleep.
rip penny, you barked at my gran for no reason, got in all the cupboards and looked like a rat but we loved you anyway.