It’s just after midnight on the Saturday before Christmas and I am wide awake waiting for a delivery. I peer out of the bedroom window on to our quiet street in a west London suburb. Christmas lights are twinkling.
What is it that has got me, a man in his sixties, as excited as a six-year-old waiting for Santa Claus? A dog called Sophie, about to arrive all the way from Romania.
When our old dog Cabbage, a collie cross, died at the beginning of 2022, the house felt strangely empty. But now Sophie’s bed was installed next to the Christmas tree and we could not wait to see it occupied. Around four years earlier, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I was coping with my symptoms pretty well at the time but my hope was that a new dog would act as an important support.
And so three weeks before Christmas my wife Diane and I picked Sophie from the website of a Romanian rescue charity, Friends Indeed. She had been discovered abandoned with other puppies by the roadside in a Romanian village.
We paid £550 for Sophie, which, given the cost of transporting her across Europe, did not seem unreasonable compared with the £225 we would have paid to adopt a dog from our local Dogs Trust rescue centre. But when she arrived, I quickly realised I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
Sophie was incredibly fearful and socially anxious. Her first days were spent behind the sofa in the living room, too terrified to come out. She showed no inclination to come close to me or to explore her new home.
As for walks, well, they proved impossible. We decided to take it gently at first and let Sophie roam our small London garden for a short time, before introducing the street. But the moment we got her outside on her first walk, she dived under a garden table and hid, cowering behind some flower pots. Diane had to drag her out and we put a lead on. Eventually we gave up and took her back inside, where she made her way to her spot behind the sofa.
Over the next couple of days, I felt a stab of worry as we saw very little of the dog we had hoped would be at the centre of our Christmas celebrations. Every now and then she was tempted out by a piece of turkey skin or some bacon, but she was mostly “Sophie-behind-the-sofa”.
After that we sank into a rather disheartening routine. Each morning, I crept down the stairs and opened the door to the living room, often finding a puddle or something more solid, the food in her bowl untouched.
Sophie’s origin story
As the BBC’s technology correspondent for 14 years, my old job was to think about the latest developments in artificial intelligence and quantum computing. I never expected to write a book about a dog. But I began posting about Sophie on social media and she just took off: my X account grew by 100,000 followers in six months. She now has a devoted fanbase.
Ever since we started talking about Sophie online, people have been mentioning the “3-3-3 rule” for adopting a rescue dog. Apparently it takes three days before the animal’s feeling of being completely overwhelmed by the experience of arriving in a strange new home starts to wear off; three weeks before it can really begin to settle in; and three months before the dog will be completely comfortable with its new owners.
But by Saturday January 7, three weeks after her arrival, Sophie was still extraordinarily nervous with us and did not seem to have settled into anything besides spending nearly all her time hiding.
I began to ask myself serious questions as to whether getting a dog from Romania was a little rash. Maybe I should have done just a bit more research before taking the leap.
I wanted to know more about Sophie’s story, so I decided to piece it together in more detail. Over the course of several phone calls with Ana-Maria, the vet who found Sophie, and Adrian, who runs the Friends Indeed charity, I discovered that Sophie was found near Focsani, a city of 66,000 people in the Francia region, some 110 miles northeast of the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
The streets of Romania are filled with stray dogs
ALAMY
Ana-Maria was called to a vineyard where seven puppies had been dumped, four of them including Sophie with very similar brown and black markings, three with grey fur. Ana-Maria took them all to her father who kept them in a barn. She insists they were were looked after well by him; the video we saw of Sophie leaping up at him enthusiastically did not indicate a traumatised dog.
So what, we asked Ana-Maria, could have gone wrong to turn her into such a fearful creature? “She wasn’t frightened here with us, only a little shy,” she tells us. “I think the transport made her … so frightened, because when [for the start of her journey to the UK], I transferred her from my dad’s to me in the car, she was very, very scared. But after a few hours, she was again the happy dog that we ever knew.”
In recent years, British vets have expressed concern about the number of dogs coming in from Romania, a country that has had a problem with stray dogs ever since the ruthless industrialisation of the country in the 1970s under Nicolae Ceausescu’s presidency. This led to a mass movement of the population from the countryside to the cities, where cramped apartments left no room for pets. As a result thousands of dogs were abandoned on the streets, where they formed packs and multiplied fast.
In 2012, Britain harmonised its regulations on pet imports with the rest of the EU, making the process a lot simpler. As a result the number of dogs coming to the UK soared: more than 67,500 dogs were brought to the country legally in 2020, nearly half of them from Romania.
A few vets have noticed the publicity being generated by Sophie and expressed their unease. Their main concern is that dogs such as Sophie might bring diseases into the country with them, particularly brucellosis.
Recently there have been suggestions that Romania’s problems with stray dogs are easing, with fewer on the streets in big cities. In one of our conversations, Adrian told me: “In the civilised cities like in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, they don’t even put down dogs any more and there are no kill shelters.” (This is effectively a death row for strays, who have 14 days to get adopted before they are put down.) Adrian does stress, however, that in rural areas people still just dump unwanted puppies, as had happened with Sophie.
This is very sad, of course, although it’s unfortunately something which continues to happen here in the UK. So while I’m glad that Sophie and her siblings weren’t left to die on the roadside where they were abandoned, the question remains for me whether we have been too hasty in deciding to import a dog rather than get one from a local shelter.
Walkies at last
As in any relationship, there have been ups and downs for me and Sophie: moments of joy when she makes some big breakthrough, such as offering me a paw or snuggling up in her bed for the first time. And moments of deep frustration, even despair, when she retreats back into her shell and refuses to engage with any of us.
It was through Twitter that we met our wonderful dog behaviourist Si Wooler. His approach revolves around patience. “With fear and anxiety cases it’s important to keep dogs like Sophie under their fear threshold,” he told us. “That means going at their pace rather than trying to push progress.”
At his recommendation, I trained Sophie to associate me with good things; sitting on a chair at a comfortable distance from her and throwing treats in her direction, each one a little closer to me. “There’s no such thing as too slow,” he told us.
Over the past two years Sophie has puzzled me, worried me, maddened me and given me any number of sleepless nights, but she has also taught this increasingly grumpy old man the value of patience. I have at last begun to realise that it is no use trying to browbeat her into becoming the kind of dog I want her to be, one whose tail begins to wag furiously at the mere suggestion of a walk. I finally understand just how beautiful a dog we have living with us.
There’s no doubt that patience has paid dividends. Sophie gradually began thawing out — playing more with us, happier to sit close to us and be stroked, sometimes even putting her front paws on the bottom step of the staircase as we stand above, willing her to come up to our nice warm bedroom where her third bed sits waiting next to the radiator.
Over time I felt a new emotion too: love. Love for a dog called Sophie, whose life started so badly: dumped by the side of a road and left to die, then transported across Europe and handed to terrifying strangers in a place where for a very long time she only felt safe in a dark, narrow space where nobody could get to her.
In February, after more than a year, we successfully took Sophie for a walk around the park of our quiet west London suburb. There were moments of anxiety, even mild panic, but in the end it went better than we could have hoped. I felt as though I had taken off a pair of lead-lined boots and could move again. It was only then that I could finally admit, after so many months, just how much I had been yearning to have a dog that will walk with me — and how painful it had been to wait so long for that moment.
I had so desperately wanted a happy ending for Sophie. But now it strikes me that I have got something even better: a happy beginning to more adventures with our brave little dog, Sophie from London.
Sophie From Romania: A Year of Love and Hope with a Rescue Dog by Rory Cellan-Jones is published on October 11. He will be appearing at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on October 6
