A Plumstead family are leaving the country and looking for a home for their dogs, Dijon and Duchess.
They may be lovable, family, cuddly dogs, but when Jessica Rees-Jones and her triplets, 18 year-old Alex, Nico and Josephine, adopted brother and sister Dijon and Duchess little did she know that one of them would escape.
The dogs, a special breed known as löwchen or little lion dog, arrived sterilised and micro-chipped at 10 weeks old in October 2017. Jessica wasn’t aware of the breed when the family adopted them.
At that time, they were living in Three Anchor Bay close to the mountain. Jessica had to go overseas on a business trip and left the dogs in the hands of her triplets, but somehow Dijon escaped.
In their efforts to find Dijon, they got to know the security guards employed at a property two roads above them. “They have dogs of their own and are from the DRC. My kids were learning French at school. The guards would help them by speaking French to them. They also went with me when I put food and water on the mountain because it wasn’t safe for me to go alone,” says Jessica.
The guards told her they had seen Dijon fleetingly on security-camera footage so she knew he was still around. “I couldn’t call the dog’s name because he didn’t know it at that time,” says Jessica.
Having put up posters in the neighbourhood, they got a humane cat trap from the SPCA. Jessica says this wasn’t working and they wanted to remove it, but their bad luck changed and Dijon was captured. “After 10 weeks on the mountain, he was mangy, skin and bones, flea ridden and all his hair had fallen out. He was seriously thirsty, and yet his tail was wagging. Now the dog is thriving,” she says.
The problem is that Jessica and her family are emigrating to Malta where the triplets will attend university. In the interim, the family will be travelling for six-to-eight weeks and not in the same place. So a new home needs to be found for the dogs.
“They are simply the most amazing characters and this is breaking our hearts, but we will be mobile for a while so cannot see how to offer them a stable home in this time,” says Jessica.
Jessica says the dogs are brother and sister and need to stay together. They are not fond of cats, but they are good security. She says they are hypo-allergic as they do not shed hair. However, they do require regular professional grooming as their hair is so fine and can get knotted.
Contact Jessica Rees-Jones at 072 954 2828, or reesjonesjessica@gmail.com