Free Fifi,
free our dog !

The dream…

From the fall of 2021, we started to receive visits from a very friendly little dog who stayed for a while to play with us and the children, then left. During the month of November, his visits became more regular and longer until they became daily. As he sometimes came accompanied by a female dog, we first assumed that he belonged to the gentleman who, passing near the house, seemed to be taking them for a walk. However, unlike the female dog, he was not wearing a collar. We started to feed him and one evening in early December, he didn’t seem to leave when night came. A little helpless, we made him a makeshift bed in the garage where he slept for two nights. The third time he slept in the house and then never left it. Fifi, as the children baptized her, had adopted us, for our greatest happiness.

However, we were perplexed, such a nice and well-educated dog had to have a master somewhere. We then began to interview our neighbours and the inhabitants of the hill. Many knew him as a stray dog that they occasionally fed, but as a master, no one knew him.
It was not the first time that we received a visit from a dog, but it was the first time that one of them decided to settle down with us.

The more the days passed, the more it became obvious that Fifi was now part of our family. We spent the Christmas holidays together, we went for many walks with him in the hill, he came to wake us up in the morning by jumping on our beds… a dream little dog.

What could be the story of this animal? Several things troubled us, first and foremost his silence. Fifi never barked, all of her communication was through looks and attitude, but we didn’t know the sound of her voice. One evening he joined the chorus of nocturnal barking from the hounds of the hill, a hoarse, shrill little bark. Fifi was talking.

At the beginning of January, worried about his safety, we bought a collar and ordered a medal on the internet to identify him in case he got lost. We felt responsible for him, but not owners for all that, this dog had decided to live with us and we thought that we still needed time to tame each other, especially since we were very inexperienced in the matter. On the advice of a friend, we decided to take him to the veterinarian to have him examined and vaccinated and finally to have him chipped and adopted.
If Fifi had accepted the collar, he was totally terrified when we tried to put a leash on him. After a few minutes of trying to calm him down, we decided to take the leash off and give him some time to get used to it.
From that day we started (after researching on the internet to find a method) to try to get him used to the leash, by holding it in our hands while we were feeding him or during our games, at the pose near his basket.
At the same time and despite an announced delivery time of 5 days, the medal did not arrive.
Fifi, for his part, never left the house, he spent his days at our feet or in his basket while we worked (we are both lucky to be independent and to work from home), or lying on the terrace, alternating sun and shade. When the children came home from school, they shared their games until dinner time.

The missing

However, from January 17, an irresistible call made him leave the house, something he had not done since moving in with us. We later realized it was the call of the hormones. There was a female in heat nearby.
He started spending his days with her and came home to sleep.
Then, from January 21 to 25, we only saw him briefly: he came to see us when we woke up, then waited for us to open the door to scurry off, he would come running when he heard the car, greet us and then leave.
Again, our inexperience in the matter played tricks on us. We had learned on the internet that heat lasts a few days, one to two weeks at most, and thought that once her needs were met, Fifi would come home.
From January 25, he no longer returned.

Both worried that something had happened to him, sad at the thought that he might have decided to leave us, we did not know what to do. We were devastated.
We started to look for him, to ask questions around us, to redo our walks by calling him.
By looking on the internet, we found the facebook pages of the surrounding shelters which posted daily photos of found dogs. Fifi was not there, he remained untraceable.
We were distraught, the fear of the worst mingled with the hope of a spontaneous return. Some sites spoke of heat lasting up to three weeks. We were counting the days.
Sadness also competed with guilt. Should we have overridden Fifi’s resistance and taken her to the vet sooner. Surely. A little voice in my head kept telling me insidiously that if Fifi had freely decided to move in with us, he could have just as freely decided to leave. A dog is not a piece of furniture, but a sensitive and intelligent living being.
The days continued to pass, and as hope gradually vanished, our sadness only grew worse, we only talked about him, dreamed about him at night. We had to do something.
A friend then advised us to send photos of Fifi to the shelters in the area who could publish her photo on facebook.
On February 13, we contacted several of them. The first and closest, APAR, did not respond to our message, that of Olhão immediately published the photos on its account. On the 14th, a lady, Beatriz, replied that she had seen him and taken him to a refuge. She even reposted photos she had taken of the dog and posted on her own account. Without a doubt, it was Fifi.
We immediately called her and she told us that Fifi had stayed for a while at her house, then at her daughter’s, and that, unable to find her masters, they had decided to take her to a refuge, the one that had not replied to our messages, APAR.

We immediately went there and after a few minutes of discussion with one of the managers, we learned that he was here. He had been vaccinated and equipped with an identification chip in the name of the shelter, a legal obligation for dogs in Portugal. There were paperwork to be completed to change the owner of the chip and sign the adoption papers, so Fifi would be returned to us. Everything could be done immediately.
We were taken to the cage where he was locked up and as soon as he saw us he was overjoyed, and so were we. The cage was opened so he could get out. He then threw himself on us, licked our faces, we laughed without being able to stop while he was covered with caresses. We had found Fifi.
A young woman from the shelter took him in her arms and we headed for the exit. I then caught out of the corner of my eye a mute sign of denial from another person in the shelter and the mood suddenly changed.
It was suddenly no longer possible to do the papers the same day. We had to wait until the next day when they would be sent to us. In the meantime Fifi should stay in the center. We were also rightly chastised on our negligence, enjoining us to take measures as quickly as possible to have him castrated and to provide an enclosure on our land. We returned a little disappointed but with a light heart, tomorrow we were going to find Fifi.

The nightmare

The next day, we did not receive any papers, but a call from a young woman with a Brazilian accent who told us that Fifi would not be returned to us. A family wanted to adopt him and since they had a property surrounded by walls it would be better for Fifi who would be safer than with us and our unfenced land. It was a crushing blow, even as we were getting the house in order to accommodate him, he was being taken away from us. A stormy discussion on the telephone ensued, during which this woman alternated attempts at guilt and feigned compassion, when we argued that this adoption seemed more than doubtful, no one having mentioned it to us the day before, and the shelter having not done no communication around Fifi since he was at their house. She ends up agreeing to give us back Fifi if we make an appointment with the vet to have him neutered as soon as possible. Commitment made as well as an appointment with the veterinarian for the following week, she announced that she would bring us Fifi in the afternoon. We left this conversation exhausted. Text messages were exchanged with her to schedule the operation appointment on the right date according to her vaccination date.
At 3 p.m., another call from this person. Again the discourse had changed. It was not possible to return Fifi to us because he had been taken away that very morning by the adoptive family who had to have him castrated the next day (which was impossible, the vaccine having been administered to him less than a week before). The discussion was even more brutal, our interlocutor arguing that this dog had spent weeks outside and that they could not morally entrust him to our custody. That the adoptive family had become strongly attached to the dog through their visits to the kennel for several weeks. We learned later, from Beatriz, who had picked him up and brought him to the shelter, that he had only spent a few nights outside and that above all, he had only been brought to the APAR shelter on February 9, which is less a week ago!
Finally, short of arguments, the young woman explained to us that the family did not want to return the dog because they had already made a lot of expenses for his arrival and that it was unthinkable that these expenses had been made at a loss. We then explained to her that our dog was not a commodity and that we had to explain to these people that Fifi already had a family, that the act of adoption consists in offering a family to those who lack it, and not to deprive an animal of its family, nor a grieving family of its companion. She then promised to do her best to convince them.
However, it seemed more and more obvious to us that, real or fictitious adoptive family, the shelter had no intention of returning Fifi to us.
Alone we would not achieve anything as bad faith disputed it with the ill will of our interlocutor. We looked for who, in our entourage, could know the center or one of its employees, and try to reason with them.
The friend who had advised us to send photos of Fifi, had just adopted her puppy there a few months before, she suggested that we go for a walk and chat with them, which we accepted with hope. The same day she went there and then came to give us a report of her interview. At the shelter, he was told that after all, a chip had been found hidden under Fifi’s armpit and that his legitimate master had come to retrieve it with a notebook in good and due form. Yet another discourse, another story, the implausibility of which gave more credence to the idea that there was no owner, no adoptive family, but a web of lies.
Armed with this conviction, we called the shelter back to get news of their dealings with the "adoptive family", knowingly omitting to mention our friend’s visit. Unsurprisingly, the young woman opposed us with a new rejection, again using arguments aimed at making us feel guilty and presenting the case as a kind of punishment for our incompetence. We contrasted theirs, the incomprehensible absence of research from Fifi’s master when they published messages every day to seek the owners of the dogs in their care. She replied that Fifi had arrived without a collar, thrown through the door by a rude man asking them to get rid of, and I quote her here with shame, “this piece of shit lying around my property”.
Since then, Beatriz’s son-in-law, who himself brought Fifi to the shelter after keeping him at home for 15 days, taking pictures of the dog playing with his 2-year-old granddaughter, or lying on a basket in their living room, didn’t like this new lie so much and texted the shelter asking them to come and repeat it to her face. I don’t believe he received a response from them.
As for the necklace, both Beatriz and her son-in-law are adamant he had one around his neck when they brought Fifi to Apar’s. The same one that we had put around his neck and which lacked this medal that we ended up receiving on February 14. Way too late...
Moreover, the necklace, we had seen it when we came to the refuge, it was hung at the entrance with many others. A green and black necklace that we immediately identified, took and then returned when we were told that finally we could not take Fifi with us.
Our interlocutor had nothing to do with this reality during this telephone interview. She brushed it off saying it was a common pattern that might as well belong to another dog…
We ended up putting her in front of her contradictions, talking about the flea in the armpit and the miraculous master. She dodged.

Another friend and neighbour knew someone who was a friend of one of the center’s managers, she asked him to call to find out what was going on and what was answered made us jump once again.
To her we obviously did not speak of a hidden chip, nor of an urgent adoption family, but we claimed that our intention being to leave Fifi outside permanently, they preferred to give him to a family who would welcome him better.
We took lots of pictures of Fifi. Since December, half of the photos and videos that my partner and I have captured with our phones have Fifi as the main subject and he is on the other half. We see him there at all times of the day and sometimes at night, we see him sleeping in his basket in the living room, or on his cushion, or on the sofa (we quickly abandoned the idea of bring down and opted to buy a plaid), or at the feet of the children during breakfast, or on our beds...
Once again, APAR is lying.
APAR keeps our dog in a 4m2 cage with other dogs.
APAR or some of its members have lost their minds.
APAR must return Fifi to us.
Now