I remember our first contact with Scooby Association. It was October of 1998, when in a solitary road, near our home, when it was getting dark, we saw a stray dog. She looked very tired, and as we used to do, my husband stopped the car to try and pick her up, which ended up being the first Galga to cross our lives.

The poor thing was so tired and weakened that when she saw us get out of the car, she stopped and laid down, and so she stayed while we approached her. Not once she tried to get up to run away or did any strange movement nor she was aggressive when we started talking and caress her. Truth is that she was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, with plenty of flees and ticks,  wounds in the body and she was dirty, very dirty. I remember perfectly well that once we gave her a bath and dewormed her, her colour was white, and not gray as when we first saw her. You may ask yourself why I know it was October... simply because it was the day before my birthday, and I imagined that if we kept the Galga, it would be a very nice birthday present for me.

It’s true that at that time we had 20 dogs and 3 cats at home, more than enough to be able to take care of them as they deserve to be. So with the family we decided that we should find a home for the Galga, as we had done in numerous occasions with other dogs we had found. But the people who would adopt her would have to be very special, for when we have looked for those families, we had kept track of the adopted dog.

Destiny had prepared our first encounter with Scooby through Fermín, for a veterinary from a centre of animal protection, centre with which kept on collaborating ever since, gave us Fermín’s famous telephone number. We got in contact with him and he told us to meet in Madrid to pick up our first Galga. In one of Fermín’s visits to the Veterinary University of Madrid, we arranged to meet him so that he picked up the dog.

That is how Fermín introduced us to the cruel world of the Galgos, for even when we had dogs for so long, this was our first experience with this race. We come from Madrid, and even though when we met Fermín we had been living for 10 years at 45 km from the capital city, in our surroundings we didn’t see Galgos. All of this changed when Fermín invited us to visit The Shelter. From the old shelter we were impressed the great job done by the people working there: Amelia, Ernesto and Fermín. Keeping that place working, and taking care of the dogs and cats the best way they could, required a great effort from all of them, for the means, both material and economic, were short, very short. And if the work they did wasn’t enough, Fermín whose wish was to keep on saving the lives of those beautiful animals proposed us the following: as we live in a rural zone, hunting zone, he challenged us to pick up the Galgos from the towns nearby our home, preventing this way abandonments and hangings. Our family was immediately involved and we went to the towns looking for the hunting associations, posting bills which said: “Hunter, if when the hunting season you will get rid of your dogs, please don’t kill them and call us, for we’ll look a home for them to be adopted”.

Truth is that fortunately for these animals, our call was well received, and even when we visited those towns, we never saw a Galgo on the streets. But there were Galgos, and plenty of them.

The thing is that these hunters started calling us to pick up the dogs which, so they said, weren’t worth it. When we got to their homes, nothing would let us foresee that there were dogs there, for the gardens were in perfect shapes, you would see no shit, not a toy nor bowls for water. At least we judged for our own house and our dogs. I thought that one couldn’t have everything in such a perfect state when you have animals, the same way as when there are small kinds in the house, there is always something misplaced. Gullible me, we here began to confirm what Fermín had told us about the hunters- galgueros.

For these group of individuals there are the dogs who can get into the house, and then the Galgos. The life for these last ones is not of second class or third class regarding their fellow dogs... it is really not a life. My husband and I went to pick up the Galgos to different towns, and under the construction of those big and eye-catching houses, were these poor Galgos, in a kind of garage with no windows, no light and with prisoner food like the ones seen in the movies: hard old bread and water in rusty containers full of moss for they hadn’t been cleaned for a long time.

For some time it was us who went to the towns, but there came a time when we told the galgueros to bring the dogs to our house, for the poor Galgos had plenty of ticks and flees, and were very dirty. One time, one of the individuals told me “how am I going to put the Galgos in my car? It will be full of dirt!” And I replied to him that the car that we used was our family car, and that the ticks and flees were his and not ours. Once at home, the first thing we would do was give the Galgos a deworming bath, external and internal. It seemed impossible that those poor animals could expel through the faeces such a large quantity of parasites....

In a year we picked up, moved and delivered to Scooby 45 Galgos. And so our canine family kept on growing. Truth is that the Galgos stayed home till Fermín came to Madrid or we took them to Medina del Campo. This would depend on the available place in Scooby. Some of the Galgos have been with us for 10 days, and others 2, 3, 4 and up to 5 months. It was living with these magnificent dogs that we realized how lucky we had been that night of October 29th, when a Galga crossed our path.

At home we have plenty of pictures of these beautiful animals with ours. I must say that there was never a fight between our dogs and the foster dogs. I must say though that the sofas were in very big demand. We once took 14 Galgos to Scooby, together with 6 crossed bred puppies of 4 months old that one 31st of December, three months before, we had taken out of a kind of hole. The hole was of about one meter deep (Fermín could see it in one of his visits to our house),full of mud and excrement, in the middle of the countryside. I want to tell you the story of this litter.

For Christmas 2002 it had snowed heavily in Madrid, and on December 31st the countryside was white and immaculate. Only our footprints would stain it until the place where the litter was, watched over by their parents. It began on December 30th when our daughter, coming home after work, and passing through a town 7 km from our home, saw in the snowed countryside a puppy walking. She parked the car as she could, got down and followed the little daring one (who was later called at home The Lookout), who guided her to the hole, where his brothers were. She could pick up the puppy and leaned out to the hole, since she could hear other puppies cry.

With this story I wanted you to know how was our first contact with Scooby, the big unknown from Span till then. We would like to say thanks to Amelia, Fermín, Ernesto, for supporting us in this and many other occasions that would come. To Maria Jose, my great friend, incorporated a bit later to the Scooby team, and mother of all the four legged inhabitants of the shelter.

Thanks to you all for having the patience of reading this small story of our life and thanks Fermín for showing us what our eyes hadn’t seen before, and introducing us in the wonderful and at the same time cruel world of the Galgos.

By the way, we have our own Galga for eight months now. She is called Luna and is the first Therapist Galga in a Day Centre for people who have Alzheimer. There is a brief story about Luna in the Scooby website.

Again, thanks to all the people who make Scooby possible, to the voluntaries who come from other countries to help in the care and maintenance of our dogs, which can be families who spend their holidays here or veterinaries. To all of them our enormous gratitude in the name of our Spanish dogs, and we extend it to Maria, Cobie, Hamed.

We are probably forgetting some of you, but for all of you, our most sincere gratitude. With Fermín and Ma Jose, with whom we keep in contact personally or on the phone, especially during this period of the year, when the Galgos “are not worth it”, we continue picking up Galgos to take them to Scooby. When we go to Medina del Campo, we eat together and dedicate 2 or 3 hours to exchange opinions on the imperfect and cruel world which, regarding the animals, we had to live in.

Many kisses for all of you

Virginia.