We once decided to foster a dog, because we thought we were all that when it came to dog training. We had successfully trained our own two dogs, as well as a number of other peoples', and it was becoming a family hobby.
Our dogs were so good that they sat before going in or out of a door and
waited for permission. If we said the word "crate" in a
conversation they would automatically go into their own crate and sit
there. With the exception of a voluminously liquid bout of food poisoning
that resulted from a giddy midnight
So, back when we thought we were all that, we thought we would bless the world with our dog training skills and take in a foster dog. Our job was to train him to behave in the house, learn some manners, and give him the skills he needed to be attractive to potential owners. Because I loved the breed, and had success in training other terriers, we got involved with a regional Bull Terrier Rescue League.
Soon the organization had a dog for us. He was called Moose, a snow-white bull terrier with a string of former homes. He was owned by a soft-hearted veterinarian who no ability to train animals. Moose had a neurological problem that is common to that breed, which caused him to compulsively spin around in circles. He was also completely deaf -- a double whammy. I didn't know, but this attempt at teaching him sign language was last ditch effort to keep the dog from being euthanized.
I spent the few weeks or so before he came to us reading about bull terriers, specific neurological issues, and training deaf dogs. In my ignorance, I thought a few weeks of study would be enough.
When his owners dropped him off, they brought a crate, a food and water bowl, a choke collar, a prong collar, a barking shock collar, a dog seat belt for rides in the car, a bag of food larger than my middle child, and several bottles of drugs that a body could be stabbed for in certain social circles, including Phenobarbital, Valium, and Xanax.
They included a list of instructions on how to drug this dog, when to drug him, and under what conditions I was to add more drugs or lessen his dosages, and oh yeah, he was an uncontrollable barker. Had I known about this before I agreed to foster Moose, I might have refused to take him. I fact, I thought about backing down and asked the owners to take their hairy little addict back home, but I took a look at him frolicking with the children in the living room, and in my naiveté, simply couldn't do it. He looked okay. Perhaps he wasn't as bad as his meds made him out to be.
He was a beautiful dog, if you like looking at a pink-skinned demon with a head shaped like a football and a body shaped like a steroid-injected potato. English Bull Terriers have a countenance about them that is unlike anything else. They mostly look like they've inspirated a huge snort of nitrous oxide and are commencing to ponder, while high, one of life's unanswerable questions while at the same time, planning a nasty prank. They have an element of yin and yang in them -- purity and wickedness cohabiting in a fur furnace. The children fell in love with him on the spot.
The owners drove off shouting, "We'll mail more meds if you start to run out!" And, "He's not picky! He eats anything! And oh yeah! He can't swim?"
"What!" I shouted.
"Bye!" and they left us with a fist full of barbiturates and a panting, pink and white anvil.
Five minutes later he was at the bottom of the pool for the second time. We had been on the back patio watching the dog sniff around and explore. He circled the pool, looked sideways at something that caught his eye, and stepped over the edge. My teenager, fresh from the shower, had leaped in after him the first time, and dragged him out. He snarfed water and shook his head and immediately started to circle the pool again. He bent over the edge to bite a flower that had blown in and went in headfirst this time.
"Wait!" I shouted. "Let's see if he can swim at all." We watched the dog sink to the bottom, spine first. He righted himself, then began to walk on the bottom of the pool towards the deep end.
"Kids," I said later. "This dog has the molecular density of Bohrium. He cannot be alone outside, and he must always be leashed"
The dog trotted over to the yard and squatted. He looked at us out of the corner of his eye and birthed a flaxen-haired Barbie head inside a large soft-serve pile of stool.
Over the next three days the dog circled the pool whenever he could, walking around the six-inch coping like a tightrope, often biting floating flowers or bubbles. He would submerge his nose up the lower rim of his eyelids, and bark underwater. He fell in fourteen times. When we pulled him in on his leash, he wagged his tail, and started another lap around the coping.
His owners mailed over a dog life vest, which we strapped on him whenever he was outside. He wore the vest like a bat cape, launching himself over the edge of the pool at a full run. With the vest on he was able to fulfill his dream of swimming like buoyant piglet. He swam for hours.
Outside, he was a happy dog. We threw the ball to him in the pool and he swam and swam. We took him on five walks a day. He showed little interest in training or sign language. After two weeks of signing "sit" and reinforcing it with treats and love, he sat sporadically, when he remembered. If he felt like it.
Inside,
it was a different story. He followed my husband around anxiously. He
galloped across all terrain, including the dining table, beds, and the other
dogs’ backs. He had a leash on and was attached to one of us whenever he was
outside of his crate, but this didn’t seem to matter. A few days into his visit
with us, he stopped and turned toward the patio, then gazed out with a look on
his face I had never seen before. It took a moment to realize that he was
filling my Labrador
Several times a day, possibly when medication doses were waning, he would begin to shark around the house and yard looking for something to destroy. He enjoyed ripping apart whole coconuts, defecating on the patio, eviscerating "indestructible" dog toys, and plucking the laundry off of the clothes line.
One evening we were sitting at the outside table enjoying dinner. We speculated that he might be settling down." He sure is cute," we said. "Look how he enjoys being around us when we do things together as a family." The dog trotted jauntily around the pool wearing his life vest, nearly lost his balance, then recovered. He stood for a moment, facing the canal, taking in the evening air. Then he looked over his left shoulder at us, a glint in his eye, hunched forward and shot a hot horizontal stream of diarrhea five feet across the deck, into the pool.
Moose loved his toys so much that he killed them and consumed them. Then whatever of the toy was not in his colon, he left in a pile, and turned a cold nose to. Occasionally he would revisit the pile of old toy and upset himself. He would bark at it, possibly regretting his decision to love it too much. No matter – there was always something else to do – knock down a garbage can, vomit in my shoe, eat a worm. Our own dogs looked on in horror.
Meanwhile the training was going poorly. After three weeks, he was still not
sitting, or showing a glimmer of hope in being able to obey even the least
command. He had no desire to please us and did not care what any of us were
doing. Apparently, the phrase “he eats anything” applied to anything that
wasn’t food. He could swallow a whole Beanie Baby and out it would come a day
later, encased in fully-formed stool the shape of his large intestine, but
adding a teaspoon of beef broth to his food caused a two-day bout of diarrhea
and midnight
The owners, who promised me every day for two weeks that the new meds were in the mail, stopped taking my calls, and I knew something was wrong. I began to talk to the children about giving him back. I suggested that he might be too neurologically damaged to be rehabilitated, at least by us. They begged me to give him more time. All he needed was love, they said. We had read Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul, so we loved him to death, giving him our attention, our time, and every bit of effort we had.
And finally, after halving his pills, and waiting for an appointment with our own vet, we ran out of meds, and the dog turned. The first night, he attacked my terrier, then went after my son. We were at the owner’s clinic by the next morning, where I found myself surrounded by a sea of phenobarbitol.
“The mail never came,” I spat.
She took one look at her dog and said, “I’m sorry.”
“You need to put him down. He could have killed one of my kids.” I turned my back, walked away, and cried myself home.
Further research I did on his disease and deafness allowed me to not feel bad for wishing that dog to be put down, although I continued to feel terribly for putting my own dogs and family in such a dangerous situation because of my Pollyana-fueled ignorance.
Our
hard lessons: Training a dog and rehabilitating him are not the same things.
Some dogs can’t be rehabilitated, no matter how much you work with them. People
lie. Love isn’t always enough. And finally, we weren’t all that.
Wow - what a story. I was on hold with the airlines so I was able to read without an interruption. I couldn't wait to get to the outcome of this "doggies tale" as I felt your exasperation in the attempt to train him. The last paragraph truly summed up the moral to the story. I wish dogs could talk. I'm sure he would have given you an earful that first night.
Posted by: Cyber Psalmist | July 06, 2008 at 08:59 PM
My goodness. You can't say you didn't try though!
Posted by: Black Belt Mama | July 06, 2008 at 08:05 PM