Poor Rose was locked up for 4 years because people thought she was a “bad” dog. But now her life has changed.
Rose is a female dog who just needed someone to believe in her and Glorianna Lagnese turned out to be the perfect owner. She adopted her after her friends took her from an orphanage in Connecticut in 2013.
Glorianna said, “The shelter workers feared that she would be euthanized due to her lack of training and because of being black, as black dogs don’t get adopted that easily. So they removed him, hoping they could get him to work with other dogs. But it was too much and they asked me to take care of her. She was at our house a lot, then a few nights. She fit really well… so they asked us if we wanted to keep her.”
Glorianna describes Rose as a “good dog” who got along well with other dogs, cats, and small children, but she had a lot of fear issues.
She said, “She’s a scared dog. She didn’t have self-confidence. Sometimes she heard noises in the house and ran and hid.”
So Glorianna began training Rose, who was slowly but surely moving forward. Unfortunately, an unexpected thing happened a year later.
Someone broke into Glorianna’s house and released all of her dogs, including Rose. When the neighbors tried to catch the escaped dogs, Rose panicked and bit two people.
Glorian said, “She was in an apartment building and they cornered her, trying to catch her, and she went berserk. There were people around her that she didn’t know, and she had nowhere to go.”
Glorianne explains that it was not a serious injury, but the neighbors called the police and animal control. Glorianna was told that Rose needed to go back to the orphanage 10 days.
She said, “I said, ‘OK, here’s the dog,’ because I didn’t know I could say anything else. I her back to them, following the instructions, and they said, ‘Ten days.’”
But 10 days passed, and the nursery did not release her. Glorianna was told that Rose should be put down because she was a “violent dog”.
Glorianna was immediately shocked and upset, so she teamed up with Tom Page, a lawyer from Project Lexus, who regularly helps prevent death of dogs.
Page began working on Rose’s case for free, fighting to free a frightened dog from a kennel. The case grew more complicated and was eventually taken to federal courts.
Glorian said, “She’s a good dog and I didn’t understand why they had to kill her because she bit someone. I decided I wanted to fight for her and we did.”
Poor Rose was suffering in the orphanage, and Glorianna was trying her best to get her out of there. The dog would spend days and nights shut up in her kennel without a soft bed or toys. According to Page, Rose also received no medical attention. To console herself, she grabbed her metal bowl and raised it to her mouth.
Glorianna and her husband tried to visit Rose all the time, but the staff only allowed them to see her in a cage behind a fence.
She said, “All we could do was talk to her from a distance … and it was very hard for us, and it was very hard for her. I could not understand why we had to leave her and why I could never pet her, go to her or give her a gift. It was awful.”
Four and a half years passed before Rose was finally released from the kennel.
In order to trade her freedom, Glorianna had to give up on her. However, Furry Friends Foster and Rescue, run by Leslie Rich, Glorianna’s friend, agreed to take Rose under her wing.
Page also arranged training for Rose with a professional dog trainer Allen Shikula to satisfy the courts.
Glorian said, “I can’t believe she’s finally out. Four years and eight months of torture are over.”
Page, who worked tirelessly on Rose’s case, said he was “delighted” that Rose was finally free.
Rose, now about 7 years old, is adjusting very well to her new life outside of the kennel.
Glorian said, “I thought she was going to be very, very afraid of everything, that for a while she wouldn’t want to get close to her trainer or anything, but that didn’t happen. One night at 2 a.m. I woke up and Allen sent me a video of her. It was the same day she came out and he gently petted her on the head, and she stood up and rested her head on his knees. I was crying. That was the best thing that I could see after wokeing up.”
Glorian added, “This dog is very strong. She recovered faster that we could imagine.”
Rose has many more months of training and rehab ahead of her, but finally she can be adopted and Glorianna wants to make sure she finds a better home.
She said, “I want a family that will take her for walks, love her, give her treats and let her sleep in her bed…and be a dog because that’s what she was supposed to have all this time.”
