Hello from Gladlyville, where Champ the foster dog is taking up a lot of space in my head. One of the kids in particular had been begging to get a dog and was entirely undeterred by our "dogs are a lot of work" speeches. We settled on fostering as a way to try out dog ownership.
Champ is kind of a lot, my friends. Champ had some kind of terrible past experience with a loose dog, we think, because he just cannot deal with leashed dogs. He doesn't care if they're inside barking their heads off; he doesn't care if they're barking their heads off behind a fence. But if they're on a leash, and especially if they're walking towards him -- then it's Katy-bar-the-door time. He barks and whines and pulls and generally flips his lid. "Barks" is not a sufficient verb there, though. He makes the most terrified/terrifying noises he is capable of making. It's distressing all around.
This morning we left for our walk just in time to encounter one of my neighbors walking her tiny little dachshund-esque dog. Champ freaked out ("I will eat you! Do not eat me! I will eat you! I am very scary! You are also very scary! Go away! No! Come back so I can eat you!") loudly enough that another neighbor a few houses away commented on it as we walked past.
"You know what I'd do?" said this kindly older man. "I'd anoint him with oil and pray for the Lord to speak the truth to his heart that his past is over and gone. Because Scripture says that the Lord will bless us AND our animals."
I don't know what Champ would think if I anointed his head with oil. Well, I think he'd probably want to eat the oil, and I think he'd probably be unhappy that his tongue does not stretch to the top of his head. Maybe I could anoint his belly with oil and he could lick it off afterward. Maybe I just could sprinkle him with blessed salt so he wouldn't smell funny to himself.
Mostly he has good manners. He never begs at the table, he understands perfectly that he is not to go upstairs, and he sleeps peacefully in his crate all night (except for his first night here, when I was up three times with his apparently stress-induced diarrhea). He has a couple of episodes per day of being friskier than we want him to be (he's 2 with some lingering puppy tendencies), but that's manageable.
This inability to cope with other dogs, though -- it's pretty stressful. I've been trying some gentle exposure therapy, where he watches a different neighbor's tiny dog meander across her driveway on a tether. Even though Champ thinks exposure therapy is a bad idea, we've had some moments where he did okay with other dogs, especially if they were going in a different direction from us. But yesterday afternoon we took him down to the neighborhood school, where we've been tethering him so he can play fetch with us. For the first time there was another dog taking a walk just on the other side of the fence, and it was purely awful. He bit his tongue so that it bled; he was frothing at the mouth. We couldn't figure out any way to help him calm down. And our yard is too small for him to spend all his time there, so we need to figure something out.
Strategies so far: walk at off-peak times (6am, when it's a little early for other dog-walkers, and 5:15pm, when it's still too hot for most other dog-walkers), take advantage of his nearsightedness and change direction if another dog is approaching, and -- that's about it. We're feeling a little stuck. Any ideas? We'd welcome some ideas.
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