Alex’s story continued when she was adopted by Catherine and Tom, who have shared their touching experience:
“Catherine and I adopted Alex four years ago after buying a home so that we could have our first dog!
We’d always wanted to adopt as we’d seen so many dogs in our research and thought we could give one of them a loving home. We found Alex through the AWL NSW website and fell in love with her description and photos.
She had been rescued from a man trying to breed aggressive guard dogs. Fortunately he was reported and Alex ended up at the Kemps Creek shelter. Sadly it took 7 months of dedicated love and support from Sam and his team before she was ready to be fostered.
When we met her three months later for the first time she was so shy that we only got to give her the briefest of pats. It broke our hearts to see how scared she was but I fell in love with her. My wife was slightly more hesitant (she’s the sensible one), but I knew we’d be able to give her all the love and attention she’d need when she arrived. I’d waited over 30 years for this, so she was going to get a lot of love!
We laugh now about her arrival, but at the time we had no clue what we’d learn from Alex. When her foster parents turned up, they saw the stairs to our door and said “oh, she’s not very good with stairs.” It seemed she wasn’t keen on walking through new doorways, seeing herself in the mirror or chip packets blowing in the wind either. In those early days we nicknamed her ScaredyDog!
Realising we needed help to understand her needs we found a dog behaviourist specialising in rescues and learnt a huge amount. Over the next few months we were able to make her feel safe and slowly bring her out of her shell with a lot of love and patience.
It’s been three years now since we welcomed Alex in. During that time she has made our family unit and brings us daily joy and happiness. She is our whole world. Her confidence has grown so much that she now plays with other dogs confidently, walks well off lead (and comes back!) and will roll onto her back for belly rubs. We no longer call her ScaredyDog, instead she’s now known in the neighbourhood as Princess.”
– Tom, Catherine & Alex 🐾