Patterns

The dog sits in the back of the old dented Jeep, rust showing here and there under the dark green paint. The dog’s owner took off the top the first sunny day of summer and will forget about it until the rain comes in the fall. The dog is big and rangy with long fur in the black-and-tan saddle pattern of a German shepherd, and has upright ears that point in the direction of what he’s listening to.

He pants in the shade under the purple-leafed plum tree where his owner parked the Jeep in the Fred Meyer parking lot. It’s a big lot with plenty of action. People pull into it, park their cars and go into the store while others come out of the store pushing noisy shopping carts across the broken pavement and load up the backs of their SUVs. Continue reading “Patterns”

Goober Sauce

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI walk a German Shepherd client named Angel. It used to be that when she saw other dogs while on her walk, she’d have a barking fit bouncing around at the end of the leash. She was so stressed she wasn’t enjoying her walks, nor was anyone who was walking her. My goal was to help change that.

I first tried offering her Redbarn every time we encountered another dog, but just like with a person, her stress left her with no interest in food, plus, she was on the heavy side so food in general wasn’t a high value item. Continue reading “Goober Sauce”

The Pinch

Raud Kennedy - the pinch
Willie today in 2013.

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”