The latest update on beautiful Goa Indy Sophie, sent in by her proud owner!
If you are new to this blog, you can read her earlier posts here and here.
This month on 7 September Sophie turned three, and believe me – she just gets smarter and cuter all the time!
She loves her morning walks, and in addition
to walking up the beautiful Goan hills and smelling the flowers, she also enjoys meeting and playing with all her friends. She is terribly
energetic and that keeps her totally slim and fit. Even her vet asks how does
she manage to maintain her shape? Normally neutered dogs will put on a lot of weight
- but not our Sophie! Always working it off. Walking running and jumping around
in the hills.
She’s a lovely friendly dog, with a
beautiful temperament, and is friends with all the dogs in the colony. The dogs
that live with their humans and the ownerless ones too. Okay she’s smart and
intelligent and initially tends to be the top-dog when she meets a new doggy –
but after she’s told to 'be nice, that’s a friendly doggy', she’s great with
all dogs and even with cats. And most other animals too. We have on occasion
bumped into a wild boar, a monkey, some snakes and a group of peafowl on our
morning walks in the hills. And she’s been really great with them. Really proud
of her – as an animal lover. No aggression, no chasing, no barking. Stops,
looks at me (as if to ask 'did you see that?') and then sits with me and
watches them go by. After that wants to smell where they’ve walked etc.
Understands 'be careful', knows (instinctively) to be careful of snakes and
such, and basically totally mirrors the animal lovers she lives with.
She helped me rescue a tiny kitten a week
back who’s safely with a friend now; adopted and entertaining all there.
Lovely little kitten that was shivering and scared of Sophie – who was only trying
to protect him – till I came and then she literally dragged me to see the
kitten and kept looking at me, as if to say 'what’ll we do with him now?'
She does have her favourite friends too. There’s the brown dog (Brownie – that lives with a neighbour down
the road) whom she loves to meet and play, nay, horse around with, big time, every morning after her walk. They look like they’re attacking each
other but are just playing, believe me. And there’s the small female free-roamer (gray
one in the pics) that she loves having for company on her walks… Right up the
hills and back.
She is an extremely picky eater. Loves
tasty stuff and will eat almost anything, provided it tastes good. Loves
pasta, with or without sauce, loves vegetables and will eat meats only once a day.
Chapatis are her favourite as are soups (any type even spinach), ice-cream
and pudding.
She loves to join me in feeding the colony
free-roamers. She will get really mad and start
barking her head off at me, if I go out and feed them without
her.
Remember how she organized her own
adoption? Well she’s now helping me with the important ABC (animal birth
control) stuff for all her friends in the colony where she lives.
She helped me catch them to send them to
the local neutering centre – and missed them like anything
while they were away for three days getting spayed and recovering, and was ecstatic
when they came back!
In fact the day they were all gone, she was
totally down, very quiet and even refused to eat the whole day, wondering where her friends had gotten to and what we’d done with them. I think seeing them
being loaded into the caged-truck somewhat upset her…
When I got back in the evening I took her
to where she normally meets them and explained to her that they’ll 'be back
soon,' words she understands as we often tell her that when someone’s gone off
somewhere. And she gets it. So she understood and then was back to normal!
Text and photos: David
Goa
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