The moment a dumped dog realizes she's safe
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00:00 It was written on her paperwork that she was found in the dumpster and someone took her to animal control.
00:05 Are you snuggling your dinosaur?
00:07 He's completely deaf.
00:08 My name is Jess and this is Francine's story for GeoBeats.
00:13 We'll never have the obviously full details of why she was in the dumpster,
00:18 but we can speculate that maybe she was from a breeding situation.
00:23 Francine.
00:23 A deaf and ill dog is not a dog that you can sell
00:27 and it can be really expensive to provide medical care.
00:30 So it's possible that someone just thought that was kind of the best thing for her at the time.
00:35 She was originally my foster dog through a local rescue group called Dark Horse Dogs.
00:42 The person who runs the rescue, she said,
00:44 "Do you want to foster this mangy, possibly deaf, pit bull puppy?"
00:49 And I couldn't say no.
00:50 I think mangy and deaf were the two selling points for me.
00:55 [dog barks]
00:57 Once she came home, she was just this little meatball with legs running around,
01:02 barking and screaming, a constant source of entertainment.
01:05 [dog barks]
01:09 She will jump up and off furniture and land on her side and not even shake it off.
01:15 And she does it over and over and over.
01:17 As a dog trainer, typically I'd be like, "Oh, you shouldn't laugh at that. That's so sad."
01:24 But you can tell Francine has so much fun because she'll jump up on the couch
01:28 and throw herself off again.
01:29 And it's just a constant cycle of her doing really silly things.
01:33 [dog barks]
01:34 Her personality is very challenging to sum up.
01:37 [dog howls]
01:41 She's just been parkouring around my apartment ever since we met.
01:44 She has a lot of hand signals.
01:46 [dog snorts]
01:50 If she's more than 10 or 15 feet away from me, she's always looking for me,
01:55 which is something we worked on from the time that she got here.
01:58 It was just rewarding her for eye contact.
02:00 Helps make her feel safer since she's kind of scared of things outside.
02:03 Francine has about 10 different pitches of barks and whines that I can name.
02:08 [dog barks]
02:09 What?
02:10 I know when she's hungry, when she's bored.
02:12 I can see it in her eyes when she's about to scream because she wants someone to look at her.
02:17 Okay.
02:17 Hello, good morning.
02:20 She was really malnourished when she was taken off the street.
02:24 Oh, that's the biggest stretch of life, Nancy!
02:28 So she was eating probably three times as much as a puppy at her age.
02:32 She had a bacterial and fungal skin infection.
02:35 She had a lot of health issues going on for a five to six month old dog at the time,
02:40 but nothing really slowed her down.
02:41 [dog whines]
02:45 She doesn't hear me come home.
02:47 She's sleeping at my feet right now and has no idea what's going on.
02:51 They asked me several times if she was ready to be adopted,
02:54 and I kept pushing it off and pushing it off and pushing it off,
02:56 and finally decided that I wanted to keep her.
02:58 A lot of people are intimidated by having a special needs dog.
03:02 It's the same and almost better sometimes.
03:04 I would tell her I'm sorry that someone threw her in the dumpster.
03:07 I don't think she deserved that.
03:09 She's my obsession.
03:10 [dog snorts]
03:12 She's just not like any other dog I've ever met.
03:15 You can't sum up Francie.
03:17 [music]