New Puppy In Less Than 24 Hours!

24 hours from now, I'll be driving home in Phoenix with my new puppy. Bringing home a new puppy is still one of the most exciting things that can possibly happen in my world! Not only are they adorable, but they always have so much potential. They haven't done anything "wrong" yet, and they are practically blank slates. (Though not totally -- if they have been well-socialized, like this puppy has been and Guide Dog puppies always are and the foster mini-Aussies most definitely were NOT, they will be wired to think that people are great and new experiences are fun.) It's so easy to think that maybe THIS will be the puppy that grows up to never, not ever, pull on her leash, or the one that sleeps soundly all night long and doesn't wake up till the alarm goes off (I'm still waiting for that one, though I've heard they exist), or the one that has the temperament to be a therapy dog (not likely, considering my breed of choice), or the one that has a perfect trained retrieve, or... And I purposely try not to think of things like, maybe this one will have fear of thunderstorms, or be impossible to house train, or chew up the beautiful dining room table that belonged to Tim's grandmother, or will be not easily motivated by food or toys so will be more challenging to train. For a few days anyway, the new puppy gets to be just perfect and adorable and snuggly. I mean, look at this:

Obviously she is adorable, especially if you like funny pink noses with black spots. (I do, but I understand that it's an acquired taste. I used to think all merles were ugly, but somehow my feelings changed over time.)

And here she is, with her littermates. She's the one in the center looking at the camera with her big blue eyes:

The only problem is that I'm not sure I'm getting the right puppy. I don't know how that can be, since I have been waiting for a red merle female for more than 6 months now. (When the breeder had her last litter, in July of last year, I actually had a red merle female reserved out of that litter, and I changed my mind because I wasn't sure how Tim REALLY felt about lots of dogs, and didn't want to scare him away by adding a puppy to a house that already had two dogs. Now I know that he really does like a pack of dogs -- I mean, just the fact that he didn't flinch at the thought of two puppies in the house at the same time was pretty telling -- so feel like it's safe to bring home my long-awaited red merle female Aussie.) I had this one reserved practically from the moment she popped out of the womb. Her parents are from very good breeding -- healthy, multi-talented, titled in many different disciplines, from Aussie Hall of Fame kennels -- and they are raised in a healthy, stimulating environment, so it would be really hard to go wrong with a puppy from this litter. But I'm still not sure.

When I visited the puppies a few weeks ago, I saw my puppy and wasn't all that excited. She was cute and all, like all the other puppies, but she wasn't all that interested in me. (To be fair, most of the other ones weren't interested in me either. At five weeks, they have the attention span of gnats and are mostly interested in eating dirt, playing with each other, peeing, and pooping.) But I saw one of the red tricolor males and instantly liked him better. For one thing, he looked at me and really looked, like he actually found me interesting. I don't take that as a personal compliment, but more as a sign that he is very interested in people, even at that young age. Then he came over and put his feet up on me. Just for a second, and then he wandered off with the other puppies, but he at least checked in, which the other puppies didn't do. Also, he is beautiful. He is a very dark red, more like liver than red, which makes his tan points stand out very bright, and he has a lot of white. Here he is:

Most of the other puppies in the litter have been sold, but the three red tri boys are still available. The breeder said it's always hardest to sell the male tris, whether they're black or red. (I don't know why -- I wanted a merle this time, but still love the tris and think they are the most classic-looking.) She's dropped the price to $350 for those three boys, which makes them much cheaper than the puppy I'm getting. So I am really undecided. I have wanted a female merle forever, and am not sure why I like this one so much when he is NOT a female merle.

I emailed the breeder a week or so ago and asked her about my puppy's personality. She was honest and said that she is not the most confident puppy, but that she is very interested in people once she knows them. (She also said that she takes a while to warm up to individual people. She got attached to the breeder's mother because the litter spent their first month at the mother's house, and then when they were transferred over to the puppy room in the breeder's house, she took a while to decide she liked the breeder.) I am all right with both of those things -- confidence can be built with training, and I like dogs that are picky about who they like. (And after Zsiga, I am ready for a puppy that is a little more needy and less outgoing.) I really think her temperament will be fine for what I want to do with her, but I still keep wanting to bring home the boy instead.

I am really hoping he is sold when I go to pick up my puppy tomorrow. Then I won't have to make everything complicated and decide which one I want. On a side note, if anyone else wants a really nice Aussie puppy for $350, let me know and I can pick him up for you!

Dog Ownership is Different in the Barrio

We're getting ready to move over to Tim's house on the east side, and I am going to miss my neighborhood, believe it or not. It's true that we are practically the only white, non-Spanish-speaking people in my whole neighborhood (aside from my neighbors, Liz and Peter, who are barrio settlers like me -- they drive a Prius and ride their bikes most of the time, and probably eat organic food and harvest rain water too), but I like it that way. I like salsa music, gigantic packs of little kids playing in the streets, the babble of Spanish coming from the houses all around me, the smells of Mexican food from front-yard cookouts, and all of that. I appreciate Tucson for being a bi-cultural city, and I like living somewhere that feels sort of like Mexico only the water is clean and the electricity always works. But there is one difference that I really find it hard to get used to, and that is the attitude toward dog ownership.

For starters, virtually every house in the neighborhood has at least one dog, and most houses have more than one. The dogs live outside -- either that, or they just happen to be outside every single time I walk or drive through the neighborhood. They are behind fences at some houses, but at other houses, they are free as birds. They can wander the streets in packs, chase bikes, run up to my dogs on walks and sniff them, kill stray cats, fight with coyotes, sleep in the middle of the road, or sit in their driveways growling at anyone who passes. As far as breeds, it's an even mix between pit bull types, generic shepherd types, and Chihuahua types. They don't wear collars and the males are never neutered. There tends to be a high turnover of dogs in the neighborhood -- my next door neighbors have lost two dogs and acquired two more in just over a year.

Every time I weed my front yard, I close the driveway gate and let my dogs out to run around in the front yard. They draw neighborhood kids like magnets. My dogs clearly stand out in the neighborhood for being purebred, well-groomed, trained (any time I work with Sunny in the front yard or on the sidewalk, I instantly acquire an audience of not only kids, but their parents), and confined. Last summer I had no fewer than three different kids ask me, wide-eyed and perplexed, why my dogs were behind a fence. They literally did not understand why my dogs weren't out running with the pack. I always just give the short answer that I'm afraid my dogs will run away, which usually elicits a sympathetic reply and a story of how one of THEIR dogs ran away once. (I wonder if it really did or if it was eaten by coyotes, or became roadkill out on Mission Road.)

This weekend I was out weeding and had the dogs out, and, sure enough, I soon had an audience of two kids hanging on my fence, with two more out on the street too shy to come close but too curious to go home. Jerrianne, who is ten, and her cousin Jelissa, who is seven, asked if they could come play with the dogs, and I said yes, so they came in and chased the dogs around for a while until they got tired of being unable to get the ball away from Sunny and Hilda. Then they came and sat next to me and filled me in on subjects like quinceneareas, annual trips to Mazatlan to visit family, pregnant older sisters, fathers in jail, the appeal of Justin Bieber, and other interesting things before moving on to the subject of dogs.

Jelissa asked me if I let my dogs have puppies. I said no. Jerrianne said her dog had puppies once. She said her dog was a French poodle and they had to give the puppies away. Then she said that her mother said that if the dog had puppies again, she was going to have to put her to sleep. Jerrianne looked very sad when she said this. She said, "I'm going to be so sad when that happens. That dog is like my best friend." I was a little shocked. "Does your mother know that she can be fixed so she can't have puppies?" I asked her. Jerrianne answered, "Oh yeah, she knows, but she doesn't want to do that." I persisted. "There's a place where she can do it for cheap," I said, and was all ready to give her the number for Animal Birth Control, but Jerrianne said, "No, she won't. I just hope my dog won't have puppies again." Yeah, an unplanned dog pregnancy is really unlikely to happen again when the dog is not spayed and is allowed to run loose. While I was still reeling from that, Jelissa started in. "Are your dogs mean?" she asked me.

"No, they're nice," I said. "What about yours?"

"Mine is mean," she said. "He doesn't like little dogs."

"Oh no?" I said. "What does he do with them?"
"He kills them," she said nonchalantly. "Did you know that dog next door?" She pointed at my next door neighbor's house. I nodded. It was a nasty little red dog, maybe a mixed-breed Chihuahua or miniature pinscher, something like that. I hated that little dog, who liked to bark hysterically at me whenever I came home and at my dogs whenever I let them out in the back yard. I had fantasies about drop-kicking that dog into next week, but never managed to realize them because it was too fast. At any threatening move from me, it would run back to the safety of its yard and bark at me from there. "My dog killed him," she said. "He bit his legs and there was blood all over and then he died." She was very matter-of-fact and not upset at all.

"WHICH dog is yours?" I asked, and she pointed down the street at the dog, lying in her driveway. It's a big yellowish-colored dog that looks like a shepherd-chow mix or something like that. I've seen that dog walking around since I moved in, but always thought it was old and stiff and uninterested in what goes on in the neighborhood. It's never given my dogs more than a cursory glance. I guess that since they are big they aren't interesting.

It's hard to imagine people who truly believe it's better to kill a dog than to spay it. Then again, I live in a neighborhood where men hang sets of metal testicles on their trucks as a symbol of what -- masculinity? -- so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they don't believe in spaying or neutering either. As much as I appreciate my neighborhood, I admit to being relieved that I am moving somewhere where dogs are house dogs and always either on leash or behind a fence, and where I can take the dogs for a walk without setting off a storm of hysterical barking at every house I pass.

Oops, MY Dog Was the Bad One

I usually like going to the low-cost shot clinic at the Humane Society because my dogs are always so well-behaved and other people's dogs are so NOT well-behaved, and it makes me feel superior. I am used to seeing dogs on Flexi-leads wandering into other dogs' spaces and almost getting bitten (usually while their owners chat with the people next to them and don't watch their dogs at all); dogs in ill-fitting choke chains that are on backwards and fit like necklaces, not like collars; dogs peeing or taking a crap behind the owners while the owners are filling out forms, et cetera. But yesterday the disruptive dog was mine when I took Zsiga for his last DHLPP shot and the rabies shot.

The shot clinic opens at 7:00, but anyone who has ever been there knows you have to be there by 6:40 at the latest or else you will be there all morning. I got there at 6:40 and there were already 6 people in line ahead of me, which made me #7. The way the shot clinic works is this: there is a big, empty room about the size of a gymnasium filled with folding chairs. There is a little office off to the side where the actual shots are given (behind a closed door, owners NOT invited in). First you go in, fill out the forms about what shot you want, then you sit and wait until your number is called, then you go hand over your forms and pay your fees, then you sit and wait again until your number is called again, and then you hand over your dog for the shots. I have gotten smart about this over the years and realized there is no point to even bring the dogs in until I pay for the shots. If you bring them in at the beginning, you then have to juggle dog leashes with wallet and clipboard, whereas if you leave them in the car, you can read at leisure while waiting for your number to be called to pay. I have never understood why I seem to be the ONLY one who has figured that out. Everyone else brings their dogs in from the beginning.

Anyway, I paid and went out and got Zsiga and brought him in. They had just called #1 in for shots when I came inside. Zsiga... well, he did not take this place well at all. When we brought him a month ago for his first shots, he vocalized the whole time, and squirmed a little, but at least he could stay on our laps. Now he is way too big for me to carry, so he had to walk in. He took one look at the room full of people and dogs, hackled up, and started explosive barking and growling at everything. He looked wildly all around him like there was danger on every side. I couldn't do anything about it because he was so, so far over-stimulated. (The correct thing to do would have been to remove him from the place, take him far enough away that he was able to focus on me again, and then gradually move him a little closer a few feet at a time. But that would have taken a long time, and it was cold outside, and I was in my pajamas and wanted to go back to bed, and truthfully, as amped up and scared as he was, there is a very good chance he would not have relaxed with just one session no matter how slow we went. Then too, he's Tim's dog, not mine, and he is not going to have performance-in-public responsibilities like my dogs do. So I just stayed inside with him even though he was acting like a wild animal.)

Everyone stared at him and I stared at the ceiling, pretending nothing was happening. I knew who was ahead of me and what order they were in, so I was pretty surprised when the tech came up to me and said, "We're doing him next, come on up." I followed her to the front of the line and carefully did not look at any of the people ahead of me in line. Zsiga was still screaming and thrashing around on his leash like a fish out of water. It is no exaggeration to say his behavior was the worst I have ever seen in all my years of going to the shot clinic, and that's saying a lot, because bad behavior is always on display there. (Usually more bad behavior from the owners, rather than the dogs, to be honest.) I have also never seen them pull even the most disruptive dog out of its place in line and send it in sooner.

No one said anything to me about cutting in front of them. I'm glad they didn't, because it wasn't my idea. Zsiga's blood-curdling screams came out of the exam room even louder than they had been out in the room. I hoped he wouldn't bite the techs out of fear, and briefly wondered about liability in case that happened. Luckily it didn't. They returned him in one piece and we went back out to the car, with him screaming all the way. Once in the car, he shut up and fell asleep, and slept soundly all the way home.

So, wow. We need to get him out every day now and socialize the heck out of him, or we will have a very big problem on our hands. Literally a very big problem, since he is going to be 100 lbs. or so when he grows up, and an undersocialized German shepherd is like a loaded weapon. We have been getting him out, but I guess it wasn't enough. Then again, 16 weeks is developmentally a fear period, so maybe this isn't quite a surprise. Either way, it definitely reminded me of the importance of socialization. I think I will take more chances with exposing Annie when socializing her. As worried as I am about parvo, I am more worried about having a dog with lifelong fear issues due to not getting out enough as a puppy. Especially with herding breeds -- they are so darn sensitive.