As miserable as this dog’s job was guarding a property in Cairo, he took it seriously.
So when people got too close to the property he was guarding, he did what he was supposed to do – what all dogs do.
“He barked and they cut his nose off,” Lauren Connelly of Special Needs Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (SNARR), told The Dodo.
For the dog, who would eventually be named Anubis, after the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, that spelled unemployment.
And so for years, he haunted city streets, often seen curled up under a car, living in silent agony.
But others would become his voice. First, it was a local organization, the Animal Protection Foundation, an organization that cares for thousands of downtrodden animals in the country.
Then it was SNARR”s turn.
“We’ve taken dozens of animals from them and brought them to the States, animals who otherwise would be in agony in a country that cannot care for them,” Connelly, a foster coordinator at the U.S.-based group, said.
Finally, it was a virtual army of volunteers, who formed a relay of drivers from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Olney, Maryland, where Anubis spent a week before being driven through stops in Tennessee, then Fort Worth, Texas.
For Anubis, it might have felt like his own journey to the underworld. Except there was love at every stop.
And food, of course. Lots of food.
“He kind of of eats upside down to compensate,” Connelly explains.
And his final destination, a long-term foster family in El Paso, Texas, is something closer to heaven.
Anubis will be living with his foster family for as many as six months. But Connelly says they are so “head over heels for him,” there’s a good chance they will become his forever family. Besides, he’s already smitten with his new sister, another rescued dog, who just happens to be blind.
After living for so many years under cars on bustling, dangerous streets, Anubis is no longer a dog of the underworld. But a god of the couch.
