“He was really the worst case we ever saw.”
A kind family in the local community had taken him in, feeding him and watching over him as best they could. But they knew he needed more than they were able to give. When a team from Little Steps Matter arrived nearby to help another dog, the family approached them and asked if they could help.
Nothing could have prepared the team for what they saw.
Turned to stone
“The moment we saw Poleng, it was clear he had suffered tremendously,” Little Steps Matter wrote on Instagram. “His body was ravaged by severe mange, with painfully inflamed skin and thick crusted layers covering him so heavily it almost looked as though he had turned to stone.”
It was the worst case of mange the team had ever seen. They rushed him to the vet immediately.
Two weeks, a different dog
What happened next surprised everyone. Within just two weeks, Poleng had already begun to transform. As the crusted layers fell away and his skin started to heal, something else emerged alongside it — his personality.
“After all the scraps had fallen off and his skin was healing, he allowed us to touch him,” said Sabine Kaufmann, founder of Little Steps Matter.
The dog who had been too painful to touch became the dog who couldn’t get enough cuddles. Gentle, goofy, endlessly affectionate — as if he had always known, somewhere underneath all that suffering, exactly who he was.
Finding his place
Poleng returned briefly to the family who had first cared for him, but circumstances meant they couldn’t keep him long-term. He moved into a foster home, where he continued to heal and grow into himself over the months that followed.
Four months later, his people found him — not in person, but on a screen. They had been watching his journey unfold on Little Steps Matter’s social media and had fallen completely in love.
They adopted him.
A dream life, earned
“He’s living a dream life with his family now,” Kaufmann said. “They adore him so much. He was really the worst case we ever saw. And then he turned out to be the most goofy, funny, sweetest boy.”
From the streets of Indonesia, frozen in suffering, to a family who found him through a phone screen and couldn’t look away — Poleng’s story is proof that the worst beginning doesn’t have to write the ending.