The joy of life

As soon as today, between reading rows in tables and analyzing data, I managed to look at this week's topics suggested to us by #galenkp, I knew what to do. All six topics are phenomenal and I could probably have something to write about any of them, but one is particularly emotional for me, so I'll choose the first one in order:

Have you saved a life? (Animal or human.) Tell us the story.

I come home from work, too tired from looking at the monitor and decide to take a short break, while I recall this story in my mind.

To make it not just a story, I will dig out old photos from my backup HDD (sorry for the poor resolution, after all, they are pictures from 20 years ago 🙂 ).

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I don't remember exactly when it was. Probably the spring of 2004, when I came back from military service...
My brother and his girlfriend (who became his wife a year later) came to visit our cottage, not far from the town where we live.
As soon as they passed through the gate, a short, yellowish dog walked into the yard with them...
We soon found out that it was a young female, not a puppy, but she was no more than 1-1.5 years old.
Sweet, yellow color, no specific breed, so-called mixed breed...
A little female, she immediately fell in love with us.
Because of her yellowish color, we called her "Žujka" (Yellow).

At that time, mother and father were working, and I, still unemployed, spent more time in the cottage.
And so, after the vacation ended and my parents and brother left, I stayed with the dog in the cottage.

One morning, I did not find her in the yard. I looked for her and called her, but she did not respond to my calls to feed her or pour her water. I thought she might have gone down the road and found a new owner.
One morning I heard rustling under the lumber we kept next to the house (we had construction work on the cottage that spring and summer). I thought it might be a mole, a rat or some kind of snake, so I looked very carefully under the boards.
I saw her, Žujka, lying motionless in the shelter.
I would have thought she had died, if she hadn't moved her muzzle a little at my voice. And then I saw...
Her muzzle was injured, her teeth were damaged and her head was bleeding. I thought that she must have been attacked by other dogs, but my neighbor told me how he heard a car crash a few days ago and that he thinks she was hit by a car...
Somehow I pulled her out from under that wooden structure, she was weak and almost died. I poured water on her tongue and when I saw her jaw, I realized that she will not be able to eat, and in order for her to recover, she needs to be able to eat food.
When my parents went to town, they left me a refrigerator full of food.
I decided to try to help her survive.
I opened the tins of pate that had been prepared for me for breakfast and let her lick it. It was the only way he would survive. At first, she couldn't lick the pâté so I left a piece in her food bowl. When I returned in the morning, the water from the bowl had been drunk and the pâté licked.
I went to get more pate...
I repeated the feeding process until the ostrich started to chew more confidently.
Along with pâté, I gave her bread, first the middle without the crust, and when, after a few days, she was able to chew the crust of the bread, I decided to increase her meals, with pieces of ham and bacon that were left in the refrigerator for me...
At that moment, it didn't matter to me to eat that food...
It didn't matter to me, but it saved her life...
After two weeks, she recovered so much that she could chew harder pieces of meat...

And in a month, when my parents came to the cottage again, they couldn't believe that Žujka almost died.
It was only possible to notice that she had a serious injury by her badly healed jaws. In later years, we fed her mostly softer food (my brother worked as a chef in a restaurant, so there was an opportunity to feed her leftover meat and food from the restaurant).

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I'm searching the archive of pictures, trying to find a picture from 2004, when Žujka most likely moved in with us, but I can't.
All of the pictures I have are from later after 2004, when Zujka became a mother to small puppies.

Žujka as a mother

The first time in 2004, she gave birth to one puppy, and after that, she had many births and many puppies...

Žujka's first puppy

Her little puppies, after refusing to suck, were distributed to friends and family around the neighborhood, so that at one moment, the whole place echoed with the barking of her dogs, if one of them got upset and barked.
There were several births. Since she mated outside of our control, with different males, the puppies were also of different colors, sizes, characters...

Two adorable little mannequins

Žujka's puppies

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I found pictures of a few of them playing with my shoelaces.
At the time we were doing a styrofoam facade on the house at the cottage, so the little puppies had a great hiding/play scene.

These little ones found it very interesting to nibble the laces on my sneakers. I didn't cause a problem, because they were my work ones.

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And my favorite pictures are definitely of my brother's little son, whom my brother used to bring to play with those little puppies.

Žujka gathered the puppies to play

Žujka's puppies lined up like in school

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Žujka was a free dog. We didn't tie her up because she was obedient and didn't damage the garden.

She knew where she could slip under the fence and get out of the yard with the other dogs...

After I saved her from certain death in 2004, she stayed with us for over 10 years...

Fate wanted it to happen on May 16. In 2014, during the big floods in the nearby Obrenovac, Žujka followed my father, who was heading from the cottage to the city, home. Following the car in which my father drove to the city, Žujka probably got lost and did not manage to find the way to our cottage.
Luckily, she didn't have puppies to feed then... Dhe left only us, to remember the good times we had with her... All that remains is a beautiful memory of her and the pictures of her descendants, which are still in the surrounding yards.

My desire to help her when she was injured saved her life and extended it by more than 10 years...
10 years of her devotion and affection that she gave us...
That one act of saving the life of a small dog enabled several generations of her descendants, who made us happy, as well as all those who adopted them...
"Žujka", the dog I rescued and the only dog ​​I had in my life...