Dog Fights Are Scary

A few days ago I broke up a serious dog fight between two dogs. I was out in the backyard with Pandora (deaf Boxer), Eeyore (deaf American Staffordshire Terrier) and Gus (hearing Basset Hound mix). These dogs have been living together in my house for several weeks now with no problems and we’d been out there for awhile when suddenly a fight started between Gus and Eeyore.

Gus may be vertically challenged, but he refuses to let that slow him down. He’s one of the most stubborn dogs I know, and when he decided Eeyore got too much into his space, he attacked him. Eeyore decided not to back down, and suddenly a full-blown fight was in progress. Although I was standing just a few feet away, I was unable to distract the dogs or break up the fight immediately. I tossed the contents of the outside water bowl on the dogs with no effect, and then turned the hose on them full force which also had no effect. I then grabbed Eeyore by his back legs and picked him up off of the ground. At that point he had a hold of Gus and wasn’t letting go. Most dog breeds will snap erratically at their opponent, biting and releasing repeatedly. But dogs of the terrier breed, including pit bulls, will usually bite and hold. So at this point I’m standing there holding Eeyore upside down completely off the ground and trying to drag him away while he continues holding onto Gus and shaking his head. I was terrified, but Gus apparently wasn’t, because for a second Eeyore let go, and instead of running away, Gus came right back at him and renewed the fight. Did I mention he’s stubborn? This time Eeyore got a good grip on Gus’ front leg and wouldn’t let go. I ran into the house and grabbed a break stick – an emergency tool that I had purchased more than a year ago but never before had to use. I ran back to Eeyore and put the break stick into his mouth and twisted. Instantly Eeyore was biting the break stick and Gus was free. This time Gus got smart and ran into the house as fast as his little legs could carry him. I then held onto Eeyore’s collar and walked him to the door so I could go inside while ensuring that Eeyore could not follow me into the house. Eeyore walked calmly beside me as if nothing was going on, while I was in a panic over what had just happened.

I rushed Gus to the emergency vet clinic, and he had to get stitches in his front leg and chest. The vet tech asked what happened and I said he was in a fight with a pit bull, and she muttered “I’m getting really tired of those dogs.” And I felt horrible that I just contributed to the bad image that pit bulls have, when I know they are wonderful dogs and I know that Gus is the one that started the fight, not Eeyore. So I almost didn’t write this blog post, because the last thing these poor dogs need is more bad press. But there is so much misinformation about pit bulls out there, that I can only hope by sharing my experience I will help someone else who may someday be in the same situation. The truth is, pit bulls are not just like other dogs, at least not when it comes to dog fights. It’s not all in how they’re raised, and it’s also not all in their genes and whether they came from fighting lines. It’s not even how they’re trained or managed 100% of the time. Eeyore is a smart dog who has learned basic obedience commands and loves human attention. He has been around many other dogs and even spent a week at a doggy day care facility without any issues. But any dog of any breed can get in a dog fight, and it’s important that multi-dog households are aware of that. Responsible owners should take measures to prevent such fights, but should also be prepared for the worst.

There is a lot of good information out there on how to break up a dog fight. I would suggest reading it now because if a fight ever happens you’re not going to have time to go read it then. Most importantly, be cautious when trying to break up a fight. Don’t get bit in the process. Don’t grab a dog’s collar or place a leg or arm in between two dogs who are fighting. If you have a pit bull type of dog, buy a break stick, or make your own. Because as scary as it is to witness a dog fight, it’s even more scary to not be able to break them up. Break sticks should not be used on breeds of dogs other than pit bulls, but I can now attest to the fact that it worked great on a pit-bull type dog who was biting and would not let go. I hope I never need to use one again, but if I ever do find myself in a similar situation I will panic a little bit less and feel a lot more prepared to deal with the situation.

Leroy and Lulu

I currently have two new foster puppies. Leroy is a five-month-old Great Dane mix. He is scared of new things, and for some reason has a special fear of mops. Since I have a lot of fosters right now, I spend a lot of time walking around with a mop, which leads him to spend a lot of time chasing the mop and barking. But when he’s not chasing mops, he is very sweet.



"You're not hiding a mop behind your back, are you?"

 My other new foster puppy is a two-month-old pit bull mix named Lulu. She is deaf, and she loves to explore. She explores so well that I have trouble finding where she went, and since she’s deaf I can’t call her. I have to wait until she appears again from whatever fun spot she found to explore – like under the couch, or under the deck, or under the blankets. She is a tricky little explorer.

Lulu started off this morning as a nice clean white puppy.


Lulu before exploring



Then we went outside and she went exploring.





A very dirty Lulu after exploring

 

I introduced Leroy and Lulu to each other and both wanted to play together, but Leroy didn’t realize that he was just a little bit bigger than Lulu.

Can you see a giant dusty paw print on Lulu’s side? That’s from Leroy. There’s a slight size differential there.

"Did I do that?!"

Lulu and Leroy are both available for adoption and will hopefully find their forever homes very soon!

Pandora

According to Wikipedia, the phrase "to open Pandora's box" means to perform an action that may seem small or innocuous, but that turns out to have severe and far-reaching consequences.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone about a deaf Boxer named Luna who needed rescue. I already had several deaf foster dogs and a few more waiting to come in, so my first inclination was to say that I was unable to help. However the dog was a three-year-old purebred Boxer who sounded perfect. We have several people in our rescue group who love Boxers, and she sounded like a very easy dog to place into a home (already being perfect) so I decided I would go ahead and take her and then maybe find another foster home for her with one of the foster parents who love Boxers, or just keep her until she was adopted. She was said to already be spayed so she wouldn’t have to wait several weeks until our vet could spay her, and she was supposed to be dog, cat and kid friendly. She was also supposed to be well-socialized meaning she should adjust to a new situation easily because she’d been exposed to lots of new situations as a puppy. So I made arrangements with the person to have her brought to an adoption event where I would be that Saturday.

Two days later, I received an e-mail from a rescue friend asking me to help with a four-year-old female Boxer who needed a new home. I often receive requests for help with deaf dogs, but the requests are usually spaced weeks or months apart. I’ve also only received one request for a purebred Boxer ever – most requests are for mixed breeds or pit bull breeds -- so it seemed like a very strange coincidence to get two requests within the same week for a female purebred Boxer. The deaf Boxer named Luna who I had already agreed to take had also been posted all over Facebook asking for someone to rescue or adopt her, so it seemed likely it was the same dog. However I explained to my rescue friend that I had already committed to another deaf Boxer and explained the situation. I said I couldn’t take her if it was a different Boxer but if it was the same Boxer and there were just multiple people trying to help this dog then I could take her. She confirmed with the person she’d been talking to that it was the same dog, named Luna, and I made arrangements to pick her up on Sunday. When no one showed up at the adoption event on Saturday with a Boxer, I figured it was definitely the same dog and the plans to get her to me had just changed based on the rescuers involved.

The plan was for the owners to turn in Luna to their vet on Saturday, and then I’d drive out to the vet’s house and pick her up on Sunday. The veterinarian and her husband also did animal rescue, so I was a bit surprised to receive a call from them on Saturday asking what time I could get there on Sunday. I spoke with the vet’s husband and he sounded a bit anxious to get her out of the house and said he wasn’t used to deaf dogs and couldn’t communicate with her well. I thought that was a bit odd, because deaf dogs are really no different than hearing dogs and shouldn’t be any harder to communicate with, but I thought perhaps he just wasn’t used to big dogs. So I drove to his house with a friend to get Luna and was surprised to hear the report from the vet and his wife. They said that the dog was a bit cage aggressive and a bit out of control. That didn’t sound like the dog that I was expecting. Then they said the dog was named Valentine, not Luna. And that she wasn’t spayed. That also surprised me. But there are always mix-ups when communicating through three or four different people so I didn’t worry too much. I figured the dog was deaf and doesn’t care whether I call her Luna or Valentine. Then we began the long drive home.

Luna/Valentine started out just fine in the car. She was very sweet. She let me put a seat-belt harness on her. She sat quietly. Then I started the car. And suddenly Luna was in the front seat sitting on my friend’s lap and the seatbelt harness was still in the back seat. After trying to tighten it and keep it on her several times we gave up on that. She was quiet and happy to sit on my friend’s lap until we hit the main road where we encountered other vehicles on the road. Then she jumped in the back seat and began barking. And if you’ve never heard a deaf dog bark, be happy. Because they usually have a high-pitched and extremely loud bark, and Luna/Valentine was no exception. She barked at every car that came up behind us on the road. So I tried to drive faster. Then she barked at every car we passed. It was a busy highway and it was not a fun trip. We had to make a stop at a dog training facility and she continued her excited barking and lunging and aggressive behavior on leash with every dog and person that she met there.

By the time we got home, we were all exhausted. I gave her some time to calm down and after a nap she seemed to be feeling better. I took her outside and since I remembered how the vet said she had jumped their four-foot fence, I put her in the side yard where I could stay close and watch her to make sure she didn’t try to jump the wire fence. She did okay for a few minutes, then walked over to the side of the house where the fence meets a five-foot concrete wall. And from a standing position (no running start) she jumped directly up in the air and over the concrete wall. She seemed very happy then, running all over exploring and inviting me to chase her. And since chasing a dog who loves to be chased is not the fastest or easiest way to catch them, I went into the house and left the door open. She then did some more exploring. I then went back out and hid from her. I waited until she noticed me hiding and then I turned around and ran away, acting like I was trying to keep her from noticing me. Her curiosity got the better of her and she chased me right into the house and I quickly slammed the door. Whew. Next step – contact those other Boxer-loving foster homes at once!

Over the next few days I learned a few things about Pandora. Because by this time neither Luna or Valentine seemed appropriate, but Pandora seemed quite fitting as a name. She got very anxious when in a crate. She marked in the house several times. During brief introductions with several other friendly dogs, she jumped on most of them and held them down to show them that she was boss. She chased the cat. She jumped over the six-foot wooden privacy fence (this time I had to lure her into the car with the offer of a car ride to catch her). She believed she was Queen of the Universe and couldn’t understand why no one treated her that way. I finally contacted the first rescuer I had talked to – the one who was friends of the family who turned her in – and asked if this was really the same dog she’d claimed to know was such a perfect dog. That’s when she told me that the dog I had wasn’t Luna, and Luna had been re-homed directly to an adopter so didn’t need rescue. And suddenly it all made sense. There were two deaf Boxers and nothing I had been told matched up because I had been expecting Luna not Pandora.

Pandora has come a long way in the past week. She now is feeling so comfortable that although another foster home offered to take her, I decided not to move her because she is doing so well. She’s getting along with all the other dogs now and even is doing okay with the cat. She has not had any more accidents or tried to mark in the house, and I’ve been leaving her loose in the house when I’m at work and overnight with no problems. Well she did eat my windowsill and doorframe when I tried to put her in a room by herself, but as long as the Queen of the Universe is allowed to roam the house at will she has not destroyed anything else. And she’s even stopped jumping the fence! So while she may not be the easy adoption that I had hoped for, I do think she’ll be easy enough to foster until she does find the right home. And in the meantime, she’s made herself quite comfortable:

My Foster Dogs Have Issues (and so do I)

Right now I have seven foster dogs, and each one has a different issue. In fact, I believe I can fully discuss any dog behavior problem and potential solutions based just on my experiences with these seven dogs. I’m not saying I will fix the issue, of course. Just that I’ve identified the issues and am fully aware of them. And that I’m hoping these dogs get adopted quickly so their new families can work on these issues and I can go save another dog with issues and identify those issues in order to match that dog up to a family who is willing and able to work on those issues. But until they’re adopted I will do my best to work on their issues in order to make them more adoptable. So I can go save more dogs with issues and work on those issues. It's a vicious cycle, but I keep telling myself this makes me a better trainer. But since these dogs usually get adopted before their issues are fully resolved, it’s possible I’m fooling myself. Either way, I have seven foster dogs with issues and lots of opportunity to learn from them.

A great resource for dog owners and foster parents is the ASPCA Virtual Pet Behaviorist. They cover a wide array of issues which I may actually be experiencing all at once!

The first area of behavior they cover is aggression issues. This includes things like aggression, mounting behavior, and predatory behavior. I’ve memorized several of the articles in this section, like the one on mouthing and play biting, thanks to Ziggy the Adoptable Dog. My current foster dog with aggression issues is Gucci. He feels threatened by dogs who are bigger than him, and he handles this by barking, lunging at them, and showing other aggressive behaviors. He also often mounts dogs that are larger than him and humps them to show them he is tough. This could be because he was given the name Gucci by someone before I got him and he’s been trying to stop the other dogs from laughing at him. Whatever the reason, it’s a problem that caused him to leave two different foster homes and end up at my house (The House of the Misfit Dogs) so he could learn to get along with dogs who are larger than him. Now to be fair, his second foster home was willing to keep him and work with him, but I fell in love with him and volunteered to take him. We could perhaps adopt out Gucci as an only pet and warn the owners to keep him away from dogs that are bigger than he is. Except that Gucci only weighs four and a half pounds, so every dog is bigger than he is. And once he learned that big dogs are not so scary, he actually enjoys playing with them. So now Gucci the Maltipoo is running around my house with all the other dogs, including two sixty-pound pit bulls (they’re only thirteen times bigger than he is), and doing well most of the time.

 Occasionally he gets back into his bad habits of barking and attacking other dogs, or humping other dogs, and he gets a time-out in order to calm down and remember that big dogs are his friends and he is not the one in charge. He’s doing great and I wish every behavior problem was so easy to fix!

Gucci



 The second section of their website deals with general behavior issues such as digging, chewing, jumping up, and escaping from the yard. Several of my foster dogs have these issues. Pandora, my newest foster dog, is a deaf Boxer. With her issues, I think she deserves a post of her own, but for now, I will just say that although she only weighs around 45 pounds, she can jump over a fence without a problem. This includes four foot wire fences, five foot concrete fences, and six foot wood privacy fences. My solution to this is to try to move her to a foster home who walks her dogs because she doesn’t have a fence. If that doesn’t work, I’ll settle for taking her out on leash and/or using a tie-out at home and entering her in dog agility classes where she can use her athletic abilities for good instead of evil.





Jet is another foster dog who has some general behavior issues. She is actually a very good dog, except no one ever taught her that body-slamming is not the best – or the only – way to get attention. She is only a year old and she just loves to jump. We’re following the article’s advice and working on her not jumping up on people. Again, I could very well have another agility champion in the making!

 

Jet



 The third section of their website deals with vocal issues like barking, howling and whining. I'm fortunate that I live in the middle of nowhere and have no close neighbors to complain of the barking, howling and whining. Most of my dogs are usually quiet, but right now I have a little Chihuahua named Blondie who is very fearful. She deals with her fear by barking loudly whenever she hears people, or thinks she hears people. I'm trying to find her a home with a hermit in the mountains who never has visitors.



Blondie

The next section of their website deals with chasing issues, like cars and kids and cats. I will soon be memorizing these articles because Pandora wants to chase everything. I also have one brave cat who lives with me in the House of Misfit Dogs, and he is often subject to dogs who like to chase cats. For the most part I don’t try to train this “prey drive” out of them if it’s just cats and not excessive – it is easier to place them into a home without cats. My cat has several places he can go that is a “cat only” zone away from the dogs. But yesterday my foster dog Eeyore (deaf pit bull) was out in the front yard on a tie-out while I searched the grounds for my missing car keys (again). He saw a cat and took off after it. There was nothing I could do since I was too far to reach him plus he’s deaf and couldn’t hear me, so I just had to watch in horror as he ran full-speed after the cat, until he reached the end of the tie-out. At that point he flipped up into the air, did a somersault, and landed on his back. At the same time, the wooden banister support for the front porch steps came crashing down (that’s where the other end of the tie-out had been attached). Eeyore got up immediately, looked for the cat who had disappeared, and then looked back at me like “Did you see that?!” and came running back to me with a big smile. He seemed to think it was great fun, but we won’t be doing that again!

Eeyore



Eating issues is the next section, and that sounds like an easy section. But it includes things like counter-surfing and food guarding. Eeyore is another poster-child for this section. He does both! And I have to say, teaching a deaf dog not to counter-surf is a huge hassle, because you can’t yell or clap your hands to get their attention when they’re searching the counters for food. You actually have to get up off of the couch where you were comfortably surrounded by loving affectionate dogs and go to the kitchen counter to get the dog’s attention and give them the hand sign for off and redirect them to something else. In the meantime the affectionate dogs were startled by you scrambling up off of the couch and immediately go into overdrive mode (what?! What’s wrong?! Why are you moving?! What am I missing?! Let me run around in circles and bark and get all wound up because you moved!!!) Untrained deaf dogs are not conducive to a quiet evening at home.



Fear issues are next, and these are some of the hardest for me to work with. Both Blondie the Chihuahua and Annie the Beagle mix are afraid of strangers, and the only way to get them over that is to have them meet lots of strangers in a positive way so they learn that strangers aren’t so scary. Since I am busy with work and live so far from civilization, I don’t have the chance to work with them during the week. That means adoption events or sometimes other events on weekends are their only chance to learn to get over their fear of strangers. Separation anxiety also falls into this fear category, and I’ve been learning a lot about this problem thanks to Eeyore. I even bought a book and had a professional trainer work with Eeyore to get him started on the right track. He’s now sleeping in his crate at night with me in the next room, and staying there for short periods of time when I’m home without going crazy. Progress is slow but so rewarding to watch him learn that he can be in a crate and away from my side without the world coming to an end.



Annie B.



The final section of the website deals with house-training issues. Some dogs are easier to house-train than others. Apparently Basset Hound mixes named Gus are one of the most difficult to house-train. I blame this mostly on the fact that he is really good at looking innocent and sneaking away when no one is looking so it’s very hard to catch him in the act. One of the articles teaches you how to train your dog to ring bells in order to let you know when they need to go out. The great people at Poochie-Pets sent me some PoochieBells to try out and I absolutely love them. The dogs use them all the time to tell me if they want to go out, and the new dogs seem to pick up on how it works from the fosters that have been there awhile, so I don’t even have to train anyone how to use them. Basically they all learn that the bells must ring before the door will open, so if they ring the bell, that makes me open the door. Even the deaf dogs have figured it out, although they can’t hear the noise, they know that nosing at the bells makes me open the door. These bells were sent to me back in January to review, and since I am an awful blogger who never got around to reviewing them, the dogs have had eight months to do their best to destroy the bells, and I fully expected them to not last more than a month or two. Eight months later the PoochieBells are still in excellent shape and appear that they will last forever! If you’re looking for an option to bell-train your dog, definitely check them out.

Gus

That completes the list of my current foster dogs and their current issues. Although I am sure there are dog issues out there that I haven't yet encountered (although none come to mind), at the moment I’m getting a lot of practice with a wide variety of issues! On the plus side, all of my recent fosters that didn't have issues have been adopted, like Sadie the deaf Catahoula Leopard Dog and Brittany the Anatolian Shepherd mix and Pablo the deaf Boxer/American Bulldog mix and Kiwi the Chihuahua mix and Leah and Leo the Chihuahua puppies and even Joey the diaper-wearing Chihuahua (who does have issues). Even Ziggy the dog with more issues than any dog in the known universe has gone to a foster-to-adopt home and so far hasn't been returned! So there is a lot to celebrate, and hopefully more adoptions coming soon!