Many years ago when I still volunteered at my local humane society, I was asked by the K9 staff to coach a new volunteer, David, who apparently had pestered them with requests for additional training. For several months, I coached David on handling the more challenging shelter residents, and with the keenness and capacity he was showing, I encouraged him to grow his learning by fostering. A year or so later, he was ready to foster now that he’d secured a rental home with a small yard. He brought home Snickers, an American foxhound who was found as a stray and taken in by a local shelter before being transferred to ours.
David is one of the people I coached the most intensely, speaking to him once a day on average for the first year that he had Snickers. Snickers had already been returned after two failed adoptions that included multiple bite incidents. He developed severe anxiety, was fitted into a ThunderShirt, and put on antidepressants. Sadly, but not surprisingly, nothing seemed to help.
When David brought Snickers home, he immediately started the decompression process, which meant weaning him off the medication under the supervision of a vet. It also meant several hours in the crate alternating with outings in the yard, mostly alone but always under David’s watchful eye. Snickers tried escaping several times, from the crate and from the yard. He also had eye problems and did not particularly welcome David giving him his eye drops.
David understood that Snickers would stop trying to escape once he felt safe in the daily structure, so he stuck to his guns. David didn’t talk nor expect much in those early days. He simply worked to establish a predictable routine and met the dog’s basic needs. He located a park for vigorous exercise sessions and a quiet alley near the house where they spent many weeks doing their exercises, hanging out, and eventually playing.
As expected, Snickers began calming down, and David noted fewer episodes of barking in the crate or escaping from the yard, signaling that it was time to do more. For a while, every change of environment caused Snickers to regress and revert to the anxious ways of the past. David had to learn patience and not pile unfair expectations on him.
In about six months, he got the dog ready for adoption but, unfortunately, was not allowed to participate in Snickers’s adoption process. So David decided to keep Snickers, whom he renamed Doug, as he wasn’t about to let months of hard work fall into the wrong hands.
Adopting Doug gave him the opportunity to finish his training and integrate him into his life as a mature, bonded, and fully off-leash capable animal. Thanks to this “failed” foster experience, David was able to learn the entire process of working with a dog from early decompression days to Foundations and Integration, applying the process almost to perfection. He was able to finish Doug’s rearing, turning the once-medicated hound into a sound, strong, and spirited dog that lived free until his last breath.
