I’ve adopted the dog.

Her name is Tessie now. Here are some pics!

I’m more than a little amazed that I happened upon a dog that meets my ideal so quickly. She’s the most agreeable little thing you could imagine, a total cuddler. Pretty much house trained from day one. She tends to be slightly on the cautious side but if you give her time to get used to something she comes around quickly.

Her only real “issue” is that she seems to be afraid of certain types of other dog (big ones)–we see them from time to time when we’re out on walks. But I’ve been using the “open bar” conditioning technique (I basically offer her treats by the handful the whole time the scary dog is in sight, so that she comes to associate seeing big dogs with positive things) and it’s having a visible effect: she will now calmly watch a dog on the other side of the street, where a week or two ago the encounter would leave her trembling and pulling to be taken back home.

I can only speculate as to the reason for her fear, but she did have a scab below her left eye and another on her neck when I first brought her home. I’m told that this isn’t unusual in rescue dogs: they are sometimes crowded together in runs with other dogs without consideration for whether the matches are appropriate. Fights break out, and dogs get hurt . . .

As a shelter dog, Tessie was also ignorant about things home-raised dogs take for granted. The most pervasive was that she had no idea, at first, that when I talk to her it means something. Finally after a couple of weeks she learned that “do you want to go for a walk?” is reason to get excited. But it was odd at first to realize that she was used to being around humans, but not being addressed by them.

It’s affected our obedience training, because she also has no framework for understanding that certain behaviors will earn rewards. I use clicker training for the basics and when I got my Corgi, I had her doing sits & downs within 48 hours. But with Tessie, progress is much slower. She tends to just stand perfectly still and study me–the notion that she can “earn” a treat is completely foreign to her. So I’m focusing, at this point, on showing her that “clickers & treats” is a fun game and that “doing stuff” is how a dog activates the human treat dispenser. I see some progress–she’s no longer a total statue during our games!

One other thing that I speculate is a consequence of her being a shelter dog: she seemed to have no concept of what it means to have space to let go and just run. I have a portion of my back yard fenced in; the first week or so, when I took her there and let her off leash, she just stood and looked around — if I walked the perimeter, she’d join me, at a walk, sniffing anything that smelled interesting on the way (she’s got that Beagle scent tracking gene for sure!)

Then, one day when I was out walking her on leash, she started giving these little hops, like some puppyish exuberance was starting to bubble out.

I took her to the yard, and let her off leash, and she ran full out for the first time, dashing to one end of the yard and then back again.

For another week or so, that was all she’d do. Then one day, something clicked — and now she’ll tear around that yard for as long as I’m content to hang out there with her. It’s a delight to watch! Pure puppy exuberance :-)

What you can’t really tell from the picture is how tiny she is. She weighs 20 pounds.

She’s about 6 months old–she has her adult teeth.

She came from a kill shelter in Ohio with two litter mates and her mom. A Beagle-Lab mix.

I’ll post more about her soon but at this point I’m too busy pinching myself. I never thought I’d luck into such a sweet thing so quickly . . . I thought when I submitted an application (to Black Dog, Second Chance, a local rescue organization) I’d be put on a waiting list, behind all the other approved applicants looking for dogs, and have to wait . . . But the fact is there are so many like this little girl who need homes, they were thrilled to give me first dibs on her . . .

I’ve lived with three dogs in my life. The first was Biddy, the dog we had when I was growing up. I’ll let my dad blog about her if he likes–she was his dog, and he used to hunt with her–but suffice to say, she was a dream dog: gentle and smart. An English springer mix, black and white, slender and more slope shouldered and more mellow than show Springers.

My next dog was a Dobie mix I picked from a litter of puppies in Vestal, New York, when I was 19 years old. I had her for 14 years, living off-campus while I got my BA so that I could have her with me, and on through the ensuing years, through many moves, some important relationships with (thankfully dog tolerant) people. She was a wonderful dog in many ways as well: strong, relentlessly upbeat, absolutely devoted to me. She was also a highly active dog, and when circumstances found me moving from the country to the burbs, the adjustment we had to make was a jarring one. I didn’t even own a leash for the first 10 years of her life, for instance. Let alone have a clue how to train a dog to walk on one.

Laykey was my crude attempt to find a dog who would fit better into a suburban environment. Corgis were bred as all around farm dogs–yes, for herding, too (droving, to be precise)–but they don’t have that need for hours of high-intensity exercise of say a Border Collie. They were more general purpose dogs. (And tell you what, nobody could come anywhere near my house, when Laykey was alive, without my knowing it. She raised plenty of false alarms [SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH! SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH!] but that’s an acceptable trade-off, IMO, for knowing I had a keen extra set of eyes & ears watching my property.) Corgis were bred to stick around the house, keep an eye on things, push the stock around once in awhile if asked to, lay low otherwise. Literally ha ha ha.*

So I knew Laykey would be happy in a world where leash walks, not hours-long rambles in the woods, counted as exercise–and I was right.

Where I missed the dingy was in considering other aspects of temperament.

Some might say that my fundamental error was in picking a purebred dog, and in some respects that’s a valid assumption, although not for the reasons most people have in mind. When I handed that substantial sum of money to her breeder, I rather thought it would buy me a certain sort of experience. Silly me.

I still believe that finely bred dogs can be excellent companion animals–it wasn’t the purebred/mutt choice that got me, but the lack of guidance. Laykey’s parentage didn’t let me down–her breeder did.

That said, I’m not going to do a purebred next time. Or I should say, purebred isn’t the spec. I’m going to choose my next dog by the company she keeps. I’ve begun, already, by looking into a couple different local rescue groups, and in a more-or-less random act, picking Black Dog, Second Chance. There are others, and if you’re looking for a dog, check Petfinder, you’ll find some in your area as well.

Here’s why I’m doing this. First, by working with a rescue organization I’m supporting people who place dogs that would otherwise, quite likely, be euthanized. So there’s the doing-the-right thing aspect. (This particular group focuses, although not exclusively, on black dogs, because they tend to be harder to place; according to their website, black dogs on average languish in shelters three times longer than light-colored dogs–which, if it’s a “kill shelter,” is tantamount to a death sentence.)

Another plus: rescue organizations, at least ideally, are staffed by people who want their dogs to be a good fit with the people who adopt them. This isn’t about finding a home, any home–this isn’t a game of “you touched the dog last, now he’s your responsibility.” BD,SC isn’t going to try to persuade me to take a dog that I’m not 100 percent comfortable committing to–in fact, I have the option of fostering a prospective adoptee for a week or two to see if she’s a good fit. That’s advantage number three. Even if I don’t ultimately adopt a particular dog, Ill be contributing by giving someone else’s future canine buddy a place to camp for awhile. I don’t have to feel badly, no matter what the outcome–I’m doing the dog a good turn.

I feel good about this.

There’s the issue of timing. Laykey hasn’t been gone very long. I still find myself expecting to see her. Expecting her to pounce, thrilled, on a bit of lettuce I’ve dropped on the floor. (Lettuce, really!)

I still get weepy over her–I saw one of my nextdoor neighbors for the first time since Christmas yesterday, and broke up when I told her Laykey is no more.

On the other hand, there are dozens of dogs in the Rochester area who need homes. And I want a dog. And when it comes down to it, I don’t think it’s disrespectful to take another dog in while still mourning a bit. One doesn’t take away from the other.

So if the right dog becomes available, I’m going to move on it.

I’m making a few preparatory arrangements. The most important: I’d been considering, for years, fencing in a portion of my yard–not for “dog storage” but as a place for supervised play and off-leash training.

Laykey would have adored it.

Add that to my regrets . . .

I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. I’ve gotten a quote and it’s a reasonable one, and being winter it shouldn’t take long to get the work done.

It means I’m giving up, for the next few years, my other fancy–the backyard vegetable garden. But I’ve lived without a garden for a long time now; I can manage a little longer. And if I don’t put in the garden, there’s no need to remove the massive silver maple someone planted smack dab in the middle of my back yard 50 or 60 years ago–little realizing it would one day render that space unusable for anything except . . . maintaining a massive silver maple.

But. It is a big old tree, a certain Englishman voted last summer to spare its life, and it’s got this huge leader (think “a second trunk that starts partway up”) that is dead–and the woodpeckers love it. There was a red-bellied woodpecker on it just the other day, when I walked back to consider it again.

An arborist took the same walk with me today and agreed the leader isn’t particularly dangerous–if I want to leave it for the woodpeckers, I should leave it for the woodpeckers.

Good. The tree stays, the garden idea gives way to the doggie play yard idea, and the woodpeckers will give my next dog something to bark at. If she’s a “looking up” sort of dog. My Dobie mix used to look up–if I said “birds!” she would look up and bark at birds flying overhead. Silly dog.

I can’t imagine living without a dog.

*This is a “Corgi’s got short legs” joke . . .