After some undesirable gestures and some purely unacceptable comments towards my dog, Thursday, this summer I intend to get or make a sign like this and post it where everyone can see it.
Thursday is a quirky, weird, high strung dog. I know people like that and no one threatens to do the things to them they want to do to my dog. I bet those people, both the quirky and the rude, haven't been through half of what Thursday has been through.
I'd growl and bare my teeth, too, if I lost all of my family within 18 months and been taken from my home. No warning, no explanation and I suspect it's hard for her to look at her home everyday and not be able to go there. Thursday is very fortunate that a loving, tolerant family that was familiar to her took her in, but it's still not easy. She never lived with a cat before, let alone 3, and then there's the birds, too. On top of that, just as she was getting used to our habits and routines, we all moved to another house for a few weeks! So yeah, she can be in a bad mood sometimes. She is getting used to us and to our guests. We're training her and LOVING her to teach her to trust us.
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Thursday and Clover on the bed at the same time and they are not fighting!
Thursday doesn't look too happy about it, but she is tolerating it.
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We are learning, too. I had one dog in my life and I wasn't at home about 80% of the time, so my mom looked after her. Kevin had one dog in his life. We are not experts, but we ask questions and do our research. We have learned that she is fearful in the dark, maybe because she can't see well in the dark, and that causes her to be on guard. She will growl, snarl, or even snap at anything that startles her. Now we know that when we are at the bonfire at night with her, you have to make sure she can see you before you touch her.
We have learned that she is very protective. If someone is holding her or she is sitting on someone's lap, she will protect that person, so don't touch them, their chair or the dog! This is not a desirable trait, but again we are working on it with the people she loves and trusts.
We have learned that she doesn't like feet and will snap at them, especially near her food dish. So the food dish is as out of the way as possible to avoid this, but we can't stop walking around the rest of the place! We have been working on showing her nice feet. Touching her gently with our feet, teaching her "footsie" (which is to give her paw, but on an outstretched foot instead of a hand), and Darcy has even been able to pet her with her foot. Progress!
I am impressed with the changes in her in less than a year. When she was our neighbor she could not be trusted off leash, but now she is regularly off leash in our back yard, which is not completely closed in. She walks off leash with us to the car, to bring out the garbage, to get the mail, etc. She comes when she's called. Her protectiveness used to extend to the whole couch or the whole bed, but that is almost gone now. She still has her moments, but we are all learning what works and what doesn't, and as such we need your cooperation, too. So when we ask you not to touch her with your foot, it's because we don't want to undo all the progress we've made, we don't want her to get hurt and maybe we don't want you to get hurt, either!
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| Watching a movie with Thursday. Don't touch me! |
I have made a commitment to her and spiritually to Dave to look after her, and I intent to honour it, so if you don't like it, don't come over. As my mom would say, if you don't like my gate, don't swing on it!
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