Hi there,
In today’s post I tell you how we decided to adopt Joãzinho and the process it has been.
Here is the first part of this story:
We knew this little dog since we moved to Porto and from December 2023, we started to share more with him as we passed every day by the street where he lived.
A couple of weeks before we left for our trip to Terceira in September 2024, the dog started to come to our house every day at 6Am. There we considered keeping him for good if he adapted well to being in the house.
During the trip, we saw through the security camera that Joãozinho arrived very early and spent the day coming and going in case at some point we opened the door for him.
I left my neighbour in charge of asking if Joãozinho had an owner since we wanted to adopt him.
It seemed that at some point he had had an owner, but the dog was living on the street. Besides, no one knew if he had a chip or if he was vaccinated.
When we arrived from the trip, the whole neighbourhood knew that we were going to keep Joãozinho. For weeks we were approached by people we had never seen in our lives to tell us that he was very good and deserved to have a family.
At first the dog was fine in the house, but then he became a bit rebellious.
Even if he went for a walk, he always wanted to go to the area where he had lived since he was little.
One Saturday when I was going to take him for a walk to the river, he turned around and stood me up.
I never went back to look for him. He showed up the following Monday at 6AM.
Again, he disappeared for almost the whole week.
I told Diego that I wasn’t going to look for him on his street anymore because it seemed that the dog didn’t want to be with us.
From the beginning Joãozinho didn’t like to eat the typical dog food and we had to mix it with pâté so that he would like it. But as he was so capricious to eat, the can of wet food that we mixed with the croquettes expired and we had not noticed it.
There we understood that the dog was leaving because the food we were trying to give him was rotten so now we paid a lot of attention to the wet food and if he spent two days and didn’t want to eat, we gave it to the cats in the street.
We also understood that Joãozinho had his routine and that he needed to go on “his round” every day because he also had friends with whom he sometimes spent the whole morning.
In that aspect he was also a comfortable dog because when we couldn’t go for a walk with him, we would open the door, he would go for a couple of hours and then come back.
What we did notice at the end of 2024, is that Joãozinho assumed that his home was now ours and we no longer had to fetch him from the street where he used to live. The morning walks he used to take alone were reduced to only 20 to 30 minutes.
This also meant that when we went on a trip, we had to find him a hotel.
Little by little the things that were traumatic at first turned out not to be so bad. He learned to tolerate being bathed, started to like being brushed and learned to get into the car by himself. Rides in the car became his favorite hobby.
Joãozinho, who at 6 PM was already in the garden where he slept and seemed terrified of the night, now loved the night walks with us.
Besides, we understood the way he said or asked for things.
Since we took him to the mountains, he became a lover of nature and hiking; he also loved to bathe in the river.
At the beginning, it was also a problem that the dog didn’t seem to drink at all, then we realized that since he grew up drinking from puddles, it was more natural for him to drink from puddles or rivers.
So, keeping the abandoned dog that the whole neighbourhood adored was a learning process. Being a dog that has his own life and such a strong personality, we also had to adapt to him and gradually help him get used to his new lifestyle.
