I was walking a client dog today and as we passed another dog on the other side of the street, the other dog gave her the hard stare and the two of them growled at each other.
I joked to the dog I was walking, “Silly dog, can’t get along with your own species, huh?”
Then I caught myself. With the current news stories in the media, who am I to talk. “Sounds like another species I know,” I said to her.
In 2002, Willie was a year old German shepherd running loose on the streets of Austin, Texas when animal control caught him and put him in the pound. He went unclaimed and unadopted and was scheduled to be euthanized, but on his last day the Austin German Shepherd Rescue picked him up, drove him north thirty miles to the Triple Crown Academy for Dog Trainers and left him there for the students to train.
That was where I met him. He was one of several dogs assigned to me as a student to train. He was an underfed, ragged looking, long haired shepherd that looked more coyote than German. He wasn’t loose on the streets without reason. He liked to have staring contests with other big males that would quickly escalate to outburst of barking and lunging on the leash, and he was also skittish around strangers. Continue reading “The Pinch”
Gnawing the Bone 