Shelter dog has heartbreaking response when taken outside
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00:00 We were really struggling.
00:01 He was just terribly afraid of everything.
00:03 You okay?
00:05 We're Florian and Catherine, and this is Fausto's story for GeoBeats.
00:09 We were looking to have a child, and we lost the child.
00:13 I thought, let's just do something as a distraction to just look through the animal shelter pictures.
00:18 And then I saw a picture of Fausto.
00:21 He had this facial expression that just said, "Please help me."
00:25 Fausto was brought to a Slovakian shelter by a family.
00:28 That's the story we were told.
00:30 He spent many months in the Slovakian shelter.
00:33 We think he was probably brought when he was a puppy.
00:35 He was very mouthy.
00:37 It almost felt like he hadn't had time to bond with the mother.
00:40 And then he was brought to a Swiss animal shelter.
00:44 We ended up looking at Fausto, instantly built a connection with him and his kennel.
00:48 So we got Fausto.
00:56 We started recognizing very quickly that he has just a tremendous fear of practically everything.
01:01 What's wrong with Fausto?
01:03 So, lights, bicycles, tires, cars, definitely cars, buses, airplanes, trucks, everything.
01:09 Pretty much anything that man has constructed, he can be afraid of.
01:13 Yeah, he was afraid of water.
01:14 In the animal shelter, incredibly trusting of other dogs, incredibly trusting of other humans.
01:19 But if you go into the outside world, it was like he had been in a cage his entire life.
01:23 A few months into it, we'd seen a lot of instructors.
01:25 We were quite overwhelmed.
01:27 We had trouble just getting him to leave the apartment.
01:32 He said, "We need to get out of this mode of constantly stressing about this dog and worrying.
01:36 Let's go on a vacation."
01:38 It was the first time where we could see him kind of come to life, get out of his shell and just explore
01:43 without having to be terribly afraid of everything.
01:45 Good.
01:46 He's grown a lot since then, but it really took four or five months.
01:49 And second guessing, can we give him the life that he needs?
01:53 He's very thoughtful. He has a very active mind and he takes feedback really well.
01:58 Even when he's mouthy, we got the mouthiness checked quite quickly.
02:01 Catherine's mom, she remarked, "I just don't want him to get near my face."
02:05 And he just knew at that moment that face is off limits.
02:09 And I thought that that was remarkable.
02:10 He loves making his own decisions, but he also likes making us happy.
02:14 He looks as if he should be a much bigger dog than he is.
02:16 We had a physiotherapist for him here the other day, and she said he looks a bit like a Frankenstein dog
02:20 in the sweetest way possible.
02:22 Generally, he's got the fear under control.
02:25 We can take him to the bank, we can take him to a restaurant, we can walk next to a road.
02:30 Yeah! Oh, you're a good boy.
02:34 When things get too much, he gets into a fight mode, but he tries to deal really well.
02:40 Fausto is burying a bone he got. We had to take him away, so now he's burying it.
02:45 He loves people. We have a retirement home up the street, and when we walk,
02:48 all the old ladies are like, "Oh, there's Fausto."
02:51 We needed each other.
02:53 He needed us to come out of his shell, and we met him when we were in a dark place,
02:57 and he gave us a task.
02:59 He falls asleep in Catherine's arms, and then he wakes up and he crawls onto my chest
03:03 and wakes me up and then sniffs my face.
03:06 I tell him every night, "He's the cutest, smartest, bravest, bestest, funniest little dog."
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03:19 (upbeat music)