Okay I will try to keep this short but these never end up being short.
I have a dog, at least for now. And probably for quite a while in the future for reasons I will get into later.
I think I’ve mentioned Mila, the dog I couldn’t have and who had a fear aggression thing regarding my friend’s boyfriend, so she had to rehome her. I ended up in mourning for the dog.
Well she’s back. You see we don’t know what happened to the home that she was sent to, but on Friday I got a phone call from the Humane Society and the lady asked if this was “Olivia,” and when I said that was me, she said that they had my dog.
Well, I don’t have a dog. I paid to have Mila chipped and they put my name on the chip. Her new person never took my name off of the chip. So, I called my friend and asked her to call the Humane Society, but my friend no longer had the phone number for the new owner.
So, not wanting her to end up stuck at the Humane Society, I claimed her on Saturday. My friend’s boyfriend is still around, and Mila still doesn’t like him, so I told my dad that for the foreseeable future I’ve got a dog. I’m honestly kind of hoping that for the foreseeable future will become permanently.
And even if I were going to rehome her, I wouldn’t do it now. For one, she just changed hands twice in the last two months. She needs to stay in one place for a while.
The second is that she does not have a lot of training. I daresay she’s pretty much untrained. She doesn’t have any respect for personal space, she isn’t house trained, he has a fairly bad fear aggression problem, she’s afraid of men, she doesn’t know her basic commands. I need to meet with her vet to see if we can put her on a little fluoxetine to help with the anxiety (and possibly the fear of men?) I know that with medication, you want the lowest effective dose, and I’m hoping that the fluoxetine will just be a little help to get her to calm down and see that the things that scare her aren’t really scary.
Three, you can’t find home for a dog right now. All of the local shelters are full to bursting with dogs. Additionally, if I were to rehome her, I’d want references and things. I’d also want updates and visitation. Maybe one weekend with her a month, just to reassure myself that she’s doing okay.
We need to work on all of her issues, but for right now, I think that the house training may be the most important part. She seems not to have any concept of going out to a yard or of signaling that she needs to go for a walk, so I’m attempting to litter box train her. She’s only been here for, what? 31 hours as I write this? So this will take a while, but I’m hopeful that she’ll get it eventually.
I am putting paper towels with her urine on them in the box, then I place her in the box so she can smell her urine there. Then I attempt to clean the urine smell from the floor.
We’re going to introduce her to a safe guy tomorrow. Alex will come by in the afternoon and give her some Easy Cheese on one of those licky mats. The licky mats are supposed to be good for anxious dogs, and I figure that if a young man who smells a lot like me gives her cheese, well, that’s got to help with that form of anxiety. I would hope. Then in the evening, Mila and I will meet him for dinner somewhere outdoors. If we can get her to like Alex, then that’s one guy down, 3,970,238,389 (as of 2021) to go.
This would be a good time for a Germane Amazon Link of a dog training book, if I’d ever read a dog training book. Instead, here’s a Gratuitous Amazon Link of a people-training book: Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. This is a funny, insightful book about getting over the fears that are stopping you from having what you want in life. I actually have read it a couple of times. Whenever I’m contemplating a big change, I’ll dig it out and read it again. I’m probably due for a reread sometime soon.