I said I would keep you posted about Cheech and then I did not keep you posted. Cheech was our least successful foster dog. We wound up seeking another placement for him and we are still a little ambivalent about the whole thing.
Cheech came to us with a couple of red flags: his first foster family wouldn't take him back (it's because the cat would be too mean to him, they said, which I did not find 100% persuasive) and his adoption fell through after he broke a leash on a walk. But I met him and talked to the first foster family, and I decided we'd be okay. We know how to walk a dog by now.
Except-- I did not quite know how to walk this dog. Mostly he was a pleasure to walk, but every now and again he would take it into his head to seize the leash in his teeth, tearing at it and snapping at the hands of anyone who tried to redirect.
The thing that made me more concerned was that the kids weren't happy. Stella was a little scared of him: she had told him to get out of the trash and he growled at her as if to say "you are not the boss of me, kid." Pete didn't love the way that Cheech wanted to play-scuffle with him. A 35-pound dog is on the big side for play-scuffling, and Cheech was too nippy. Not aggressive, not scary for Pete, but definitely annoying. (And painful, Pete adds.)
A couple of days after Cheech came, I asked the foster agency if they'd help us find a placement for him without kids. They were great about the whole thing, and Cheech went to a new place pretty quickly. He seems to be getting along beautifully there.
One lesson learned is that people who really love dogs don't always describe problem dogs in language that is easily interpreted by the rest of us. The first foster family said "Yes, he is house-trained! Except! You should take a belly band for him, because sometimes he marks his territory inside the house." (In my view, dogs that pee in the house are not house-trained.)
One lesson I am still processing is that kids and dogs need time to adjust to each other. I think Cheech might have been calmer here if we'd had another dog for him to nibble on and wrestle with. Since we don't, he tried to nibble on Pete instead. By the time Cheech left, both Pete and Stella were genuinely sad to see him go. Should I have waited a little longer to make the call? Unclear.
We laugh a lot when we talk about Cheech, who wanted to be in someone's lap at all times despite being too big to be a lapdog. We call him Gravity Dog, because he wanted to lie stretched out on the couch, with his head by our knees and his tail by our hips. But his body was so long, and his head was so big and heavy that he slowly s-l-i-d off the couch onto the floor. He looked so indignant, every single time. "Gravity! Again! What is it with this gravity thing?" he seemed to be saying. The picture here is Gravity Dog in action, determined that he WILL TOO defy the laws of physics this time. Or -- whoops, maybe next time.
The kids don't seem stressed out about his stay here, and they don't seem stressed out about his departure. So I guess the outcome is okay, even if it wasn't quite how I thought things would go.
Recent Comments