As many of our family and friends know, Shep began to show fearful signs when around dogs he doesn't know over the summer. This really caught us off guard as we dont call him friendly to a fault for the fun of it. He has always been very friendly with other dogs and loves to play and certainly always friendly with humans. Shep has several very good dog friends that he loves to play with and has never met a human whose face he couldnt spend the entire day licking. Moreover, if we introduce a new dog to him in our home, he's good to go. Its just something about uncertain situations that makes him anxious.
What does he do when he sees a dog he doesnt know? We refer to it as "losing his marbles" but really, he barks, jumps up, backs up and lets out his unsure throaty growl. If we are in the house and he sees the dog walking on the street, he will anxiously trot back and forth back and forth and back and forth (repeat 50 times) between the front and side doors. We know exactly what it is, but understand how it could easily be misunderstood by a passerby. We know in our heart of hearts Shep would never hurt another being, but this behavior stresses me out. There, I said it. It's not helpful to Shep if he can tell I am stressed out by it, this I know. Our trainer, amidst my anxiety about it during a session, has assured me he is not an unfriendly or an aggressive dog. Rather, a dog whose past in uncertain. I have learned to just buck up and poker face him to get him through the nonsense. I have been hesitant to blog about it because I dont want the wrong impression of our anxious dog to be given; however, in an effort to remain truthful to the spirit of our blog-- sharing the trials and tribulations of an abused rescue dog-- we opted for disclosure.
To combat the marble loss we take a 2 pronged approach:
1. Shep likes to sit in our front door and overlook his kingdom. Our house sits on a hill so he is afforded a throne like view. We keep hot dogs, cheese, Pirate's Booty (discovered out of desperation one day!), you name it by the front door. Whenever a dog walks by, regardless of if he knows the dog or not, we give him treats for being calm. Not calm? No treat. The whole idea is to get him to a. realize its good to be calm, b. no one is going to hurt him, c. focusing on Maggie and Jeremy is way better than focusing on that other dog. It's actually really working, just a VERY time consuming training method for us. He has significantly reduced the marble loss in this situation. We will continue to work on it with him to get him where we know he can be. What's really cool is that if we are in the other room and an unfamiliar dog walks by, we will hear him let out one gruff and then he promptly comes running to find one of us to get his treat. We take the show on the road and take these special treats on our walks. Today was a particularly frustrating walk for me, but actually great progress for Shep. A man was walking two, count them two dogs. Shep was able to keep 75% of his marbles. That is progress.
2. Several posts ago I described Shep's snoot loop, a new head collar we put on him for walks to reduce his pulling. If he pulls on a walk, he essentially stops himself. We then wait until he gives us slack, or ideally, eye contact before we move on. When we see other dogs out walking, he of course pulls and stops himself. And then we wait until he is calm and we give treats. And then we wait until we get eye contact and we move on.
To shed some humor on the situation, one of the funniest moments to us is when we are on a walk with him and he looses his marbles all over the street in a pool of anxiety if another dog approaches. We wait him out and reinforce as appropriate while the other dog walks by and looks at Shep like: "WHAT is your problem?" Ah, if only we knew.
It can be unanimously agreed upon that animal abuse is wrong and people support the eradication of it and getting abused and stray animals into homes like ours but we have realized that what people seem to be much less comfortable with is the reality of the long road ahead for the lucky animals who make it out alive. People sometimes look at us like we are crazy for dealing with his issues,or, on good days like we are making a mountain out of a mo hill but we know it would be irresponsible of us to ignore any of his behaviors (that is unless we are purposely ignoring him!). Shep is one of the lucky ones. We also realize that in the grand scheme of issues stemming from being a stray or abused animal, Shep's marble loss is manageable albeit time consuming. We are grateful for this. He really has taught us we need to be a team.
After coming home from our two dog encounter walk, Shep and I fell into our routine. I undid him from his contraption of a leash, took off all his gear, got the hot dogs out of the fridge and opened the front door for him to look out and train.
So he sits. Waiting for a hot dog.
