Before the family moved from their Dallas neighborhood, they placed their trash and unwanted belongings in the alleyway behind their house. Sadly, one thing they didn’t want anymore was their dog — so they left her and her blanket out on the street.
“It was really cold and rainy, and the dog was lying on her blanket — and she wouldn’t leave it,” Patti Dawson, executive director of Dallas DogRRR, told The Dodo. “I think she was still thinking her family would come back. She was in that stage of, ‘I’ll just wait here. This is familiar.’”
After doing this for about an hour, the blanket — and the dog — had reached Tarashevska’s backyard, and Tarashevska was able to grab hold of the dog and get her into the safety of a kennel.
The dog, now named Camilla, was terrified.
“She basically was curled up into a ball in the back of the crate,” Dawson said. “You could touch her, but she was frozen in fear. Wouldn’t make eye contact, kept her head down. If you got close to her, she would put her head into the back of the kennel, like, ‘Don’t look at me, don’t make eye contact with me, don’t touch me. Stay away.’”
“The vet said it was either an embedded collar, meaning she was probably kept outside,” Dawson said. “The only other thing we thought of was that a dog had gotten into a fight with her when she got outside. There’re lots of stray animals out there, and so maybe they got into a scuffle over food.”
Camilla will stay in foster care a little longer so she can continue to heal, but she’ll soon be up for adoption.
“We don’t know what she went through before we got her,” Dawson said. “It’s going to take time for her to realize that she’s in a safe environment. But she’s slowly coming around.”