Anubis Comes Home

Lindsey Bever:

Anubis’s hell was real.

Animal rescuers speculate that the Egyptian street dog may have been trying to protect his territory in the Cairo suburbs or was perhaps guarding property from trespassers.

He started to bark — and wouldn’t stop. So someone silenced him.

“They cut off the muzzle to stop him from barking,” Lauren Connelly, foster coordinator for Special Needs Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (SNARR), told The Washington Post.

The dog’s face was forever maimed — nose severed, teeth missing, tongue entirely exposed….

Anubis was sleeping under cars and searching for food, his rescuers said. When he did find something to eat, they said, he had to rest his face on the ground to shovel in the scraps with his tongue.

He had worn down his teeth to nubs…

SNARR put together a travel plan spanning more than 7,000 miles. Anubis, who is estimated to be about 5, arrived in mid-January at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and was taken to Maryland for emergency veterinary care.

The animal rescue group sent out a request online asking volunteers to “help with a leg” of the 25-leg trip — a relay race to get Anubis home.

“It was really amazing to see,” Reed said.

A Facebook page, Anubis The Egyptian Baladi, was created to help people follow the pup from the East Coast to the South and then to document his progress. Along the way, people posted photos and messages such as “Sweet Anubis on our leg of his transport” and “Freedom ride!!!”

Someone posted a video with the caption: “On the road again! I’m in Virginia, on my way to Texas!”