Anica Goes Home and Becomes Sassafras!

So this actually happened almost a month(!) ago, but I've been slacking on updating the blog so welp.

Anica got adopted! She ended up in a lovely home with lovely owners and I could not be happier about her good luck in finding such a wonderful place to go. It truly was a stroke of luck, too, as is so often the case with these little dogs: we were walking down the street and just happened to cross paths with a lady who just happened to be drawn toward scruffy terrier-mutts, and who just happened to be considering whether she might be ready to bring home another dog.

By the time all the paperwork was finalized and the adopters felt totally ready to bring her home, Anica had gotten tentative interest from a couple of other homes as well, but I always hoped that she'd end up where she did. She clearly liked this family best of all the ones she interacted with (and there were actually a couple of other families she didn't like, which surprised me -- I'd thought Anica was a dog who just loved everybody, but in fact there were a small handful of people she didn't get on with; in her defense, they were all people who were not good at handling dogs and tended to grab her in pushy and probably uncomfortable ways), so I was thrilled when they said that yes, they would like to bring her home.

There were a couple of small bumps in the beginning. One, because I hadn't been given a copy of Anica's medicals, I hadn't realized that she was lapsed on her heartworm preventative and flea/tick topical treatment, which I regret and will definitely be making an effort to ensure doesn't happen again in the future. But for Anica there was a lapse in protection, which mattered because she was exposed to fleas at the previous week's adoption event and it turned out that she had a flea bite allergy. So she went home with some itchy bumps and irritated skin that took a little detective work (and a vet visit) to resolve.

Two, there was a little bit of a transition period with getting her used to the resident dogs and vice versa, although it sounds like everybody managed to get over the grumps after a couple of weeks (which is usually how it goes, but is nevertheless always a relief to hear).

And so it seems like this little dog's story has come to a happy ending. Her name is Sassafras now, and she has a loving home and great owners.

She even got to go apple picking this fall!

Have a happy life, little dog. I'm happy I was able to help you get there. :)

Anica: Week Four

We're going to head out to an adoption event in a little more than an hour, so (fingers crossed!) this may be the last Anica update before she gets adopted (I HOPE I HOPE I HOPE), but here's what we have to report over the past week:

UTI is now completely resolved and antibiotics have been completed. Anica is now able to go 7 or 8 hours at a stretch without needing to potty (or, if I'm being totally honest, even 9 hours overnight, although I recognize that is less than optimal for a puppy of her age. But I've done it and she's been okay, which is a great kindness and feat of endurance on her part). It's been several days with no signs of recurrence or discomfort, so I think this problem is safely behind us.

Training is going pretty well. Due to various life/work developments over the past week, I have once again been a giant slacker failure in getting Anica as well trained as I'd like, but despite that she's coming along nicely. She walks well on leash (other than persistently trying to get at old pizza boxes and this one incredibly disgusting, partially mummified roadkilled rat which has been on the street for 3 days right next to her favorite potty spot) and has a pretty good auto-Sit when I stop, if she isn't distracted. If she is distracted then that goes out the window immediately, but she just needs more practice and rewards when she's focused; she's making excellent progress overall.

(Incidentally, brief soapbox: you know what I hate? Seeing people collar pop dogs for not Sitting when distracted, especially auto-Sits at stoplights. There's one dog walker in our neighborhood who used to do this ALL THE TIME and it drove me crazy because (a) hello, lousy training; (b) I knew that the dog's actual owner did not expect, request, or reinforce that behavior, so the dog was effectively being punished for failing to do a thing that it wasn't ordinarily asked to do; and (c) this particular dog walker was especially bad about doing that whenever she knew I was watching, I guess to show that she, too, was capable of training her dogs in public. Except not so much, and also: who does that? Collar popping somebody else's dogs to make a point to a stranger? Triple gross.)

ANYWAY.

I've also been playing various food/toy games with Anica, partly to burn off puppy energy, partly to build up motivators, partly just because it's a dumb idle thing to amuse myself. She's especially fond of the "chase" reward (as simple as it sounds: I throw a cookie along the floor so she can chase it down instead of just eating a static cookie from my hand) and the "find it" reward (also as simple as it sounds: the cookie is nominally hidden so she has to sniff it out instead of just seeing it in plain sight). Anica loves both chasing things and sniffing things, so she is very easily entertained by these games.

Here's a brief session of Sit practice. You can see that I haven't gotten that latency period down too much, due mostly to inadequate practice (but also she'd already been working for several minutes before I taped this clip, so she was getting a little tired and there was a dog barking outside the window that was a bit of a distraction). Also you can see that I'm rewarding with mini versions of "chase" -- not long throws because I didn't want this clip to be overlong, but still useful to reset her between repetitions.

I forgot to mark the last Sit with a "yes." WHOOPS.

And that is pretty much that. With luck, Anica will find a home this afternoon. But if not, that's fine. She's an easy houseguest and we're finally starting to get to the part where training is actually fun. Whee!

Anica: Week Three

Whoops, I've gone longer than I meant to without posting an Anica update.

Partly that's because we haven't had a whole lot to update about. At the beginning of this week, Anica came down with a UTI, so she's spent most of the past few days on restrictive crate confinement until the antibiotics kicked in and she had enough bladder control to come out again. We only really got to that threshold today, so the updates for the past few days would pretty much just have been "yep, the foster dog's still living in the box."

There's not a whole lot to say about the UTI. It was a very straightforward diagnosis: Anica had been doing very well with her potty training and hadn't had any accidents in about a week. Then all of a sudden she started urinating frequently and in small amounts, and no longer had enough control to even keep from soiling her crate (which is something she had always been 100% reliable on previously), and on top of that her urine had a strong unpleasant odor that wasn't there before, so that was pretty much a textbook UTI presentation.

I put her on antibiotics and added some apple cider vinegar to her drinking water, and within about three days it cleared up. She's still on antibiotics until she finishes the full 10-day course to make sure the bugs are totally out of her system, but she's doing fine and now has full potty control again.

BUT this means that for the past week we haven't really been able to work on anything else, so Anica hasn't had a chance to progress with her formal training. I'll resume work on that shortly and continue for as long as I've got her, but no new news on that front yet.

Despite the training delay, I think Anica's about ready to start looking in earnest for a permanent home. She's decompressed enough for me to feel like I have a good sense of who she is and what kind of home environment would likely suit her, so it's time to start hocking the foster dog for real.

I took her out to an adoption event this afternoon. It was a small event, and turnout was pretty low because of the holiday weekend, but Anica still met several families who seemed to like her, and she seemed to like them in turn. I'm hopeful that at least one of them will follow up, but even if none of those prospects pans out, I now know that Anica shows well at events and is comfortable enough to behave appropriately when meeting new people, so I can't imagine it'll take long for her to find a home. She's very good at charming new friends.

Anica - Going Into Week Two

Heading into week two and I'm starting to think my concerns about placing Anica in a home with cats may have been overblown. She does have terrier instincts (loves to chase balls, goes after the bunny fur tug, etc.), but she's also really gentle and easy to dissuade, so probably even a novice owner wouldn't have much trouble getting her to live safely with cats. I still wouldn't recommend her for an extremely skittish cat, but any normal feline should be fine.

Here are a couple of videos of her playing with Dog Mob on top of our parking garage. This is a fair representation of her play style, which shows a good degree of social skills and adaptability: she'll play chase as either the chaser or the chasee, she initiates play with both dogs and responds to their social cues, she's able to break off play in the second clip after Crooky rolls her roughly on the concrete around 0:19-0:21 instead of getting overaroused or responding with snaps/barks (which I read as a good sign, since it indicates to me that Anica is likely to respond to accidental rough treatment by trying to move away and get some breathing space -- a promising sign for placement with kids, provided the parents know how to read and respect her space-seeking behavior).

After a while they found a cicada. Pongu promptly dismissed it as pointless, Crookytail was initially fascinated but then sad because he thought he killed it with a paw swipe (he didn't, but he has a long and celebrated history of accidentally going Lenny on his little bug friends, so this was not an unreasonable assumption on his part), and Anica did... well, Anica did this:

Eventually she moved into Terrier-and-Rattlesnake Mode and started darting in to bite at the cicada, and after about another two-three minutes she finally killed the poor buzzy bug. (RIP parking garage cicada; you spent years as a blind buried larva dreaming of the sky, only to wind up as a dog toy for those clowns. Truly, life is filled with tragedy.)

Anyway what's interesting about Anica's behavior with the cicada was that she's obviously interested in it, but (I didn't tape this part, it was what happened after the video clip) she was perfectly capable of focusing on me and doing Sits even with the bug buzzing around behind her, and after she already knew that it was a Fascinating Plaything. If I had wanted her to leave the cicada alone, it would have taken no more than a couple of mild verbal "nopes" and redirection to another activity (playing with Crooky, working with me, even just walking away). Since I am a cruel and heartless person and didn't care if she ate the cicada, I let her have it, but it was heartening to see how easily she could be convinced to leave it alone.

So, again, based on that I'm thinking that she should be fine living in most households with most cats.

Other than that her training is going fine. Anica is shameless about mugging random people on the street for attention (she really wants to find a home), and I let her do that to a certain extent because who knows, maybe one of those people will happen to be looking for a dog (it's happened before!), but mostly I try to discourage that behavior because it's impolite and sometimes people encourage Anica to jump on them, which I very much don't want her to develop as a habit.

No potty accidents since last week. She's holding it through most of a workday at this point and is reliably pottying outside. Anica had a little bit of diarrhea yesterday (probably my fault for letting her join in the deck-grilling hamburger festival with Dog Mob) and was consistent about telling us via persistent squeaking when she needed to go outside, so that's a good development.

I'll post a training session with the next update. We're still reinforcing Sits on verbal cues (behavior is consistent but response time is slow, so I want to build up her confidence and reduce that delay before moving on to a new behavior) and working on introducing gradual distractions. I haven't done as much clicker shaping work as I'd hoped to, since potty training took priority last week and I've been too busy to do a whole lot beyond that, but it's next up on the list once we get those Sits a little more solid.

First Week With Anica

It's been almost a week since Anica came to stay with us, and she's beginning to relax into showing us a little more of her personality. We've started foundational clicker training, she's making good progress on a default Sit, and potty training is going quite nicely. Anica had one accident a day for each of her first three days here -- although she did make it a little closer to the door each time (to be fair, she never actually peed inside my house; all three accidents were in the condo foyer or stairwell on her way outside) -- and since the third day she's had no accidents at all.

This is a really, really nice little dog who will make a wonderful pet for some lucky owner.

At this point I feel safe saying that Anica has no major behavioral issues. She did cry a little in her crate on days 3-5 when I left to go to work or took the rest of Dog Mob out for a walk and left Anica alone in her crate, but it wasn't particularly intense (lasted maybe a couple of minutes, didn't escalate beyond whines and whimpers) and it's vanished now that she's gotten more comfortable in the house routine and confident that I'll be back eventually, so I would not categorize her as having separation anxiety or isolation distress. She's just a normal dog who worries a little when she's left alone in a semi-strange place without her semi-familiar person around. Once she gets settled in, I wouldn't expect her eventual adopter to have any real trouble with this.

She doesn't resource guard anything (food, toys, attention) from either people or other dogs. She does like to pick up random bits of garbage while out on walks, but she always drops them when given a gentle "no," and she's happy to trade her garbage treasures for cookies. My expectation is that if her adopter is consistent about not letting Anica keep her garbage treasures, this behavior will diminish and eventually disappear within a few weeks. I might have time to do that while she's here for fostering, and I might not; it mostly just depends how long it takes her to find a real home.

Anica's easily motivated by food, toys, praise, and personal play -- she likes playing the clicker game and she's willing to take rewards across the board, which makes for fun and effortless training sessions. She picked up Sit almost instantly and has it on a verbal cue already.

I'm doing a little clicker shaping instead of moving straight to Down and Stay, because that's more fun for me, but also because I'm hoping that Anica's adopters will continue to do tricks or recreational sport training with her, and in that case they'll probably be better served with a dog who's had some experience with shaping, rather than just lure-reward learning. So we'll see how that goes. Right now Anica doesn't quite seem to have grasped the concept, but she's got a good attention span and is willing to try as long as I'll let her.

Outside, Anica is playful and energetic. Inside, she's perfectly happy to sack out with a favorite toy on the dog bed. She has a great on/off switch, which is always nice to see and makes it much more likely that she'll do well in a pet home.

She continues to display excellent social skills with Dog Mob. I'd be comfortable placing her in a home with just about any kind of reasonably social resident dog. Anica is very easygoing when it comes to other dogs.

I'm a little less confident about cats or small pets, because Anica is a terrier and she does have a strong hardwired chase instinct. She'll go after squirrels and cats that she encounters on walks. However, she's also pretty easy to redirect and quick to shift her attention back to her person, so I think she could learn to live with a resident indoor cat as long as her owner was comfortable with doing a carefully supervised introductory period and the cat wasn't too skittish (a stable/confident cat should do just fine, but I don't think it would be fair to subject an extremely skittish cat to that stress). What I've seen so far is enough to keep me from making a blithe blanket statement that "oh she'll be fine with all cats ever," but I honestly don't see any reason that Anica couldn't live harmoniously with most cats, given a reasonably savvy owner and appropriate support during the adjustment phase.

All in all, so far Anica seems like a near-perfect dog. She sheds very little (I wouldn't say she's no-shed, but she doesn't drop much hair at all), she's not a barker, she's extremely affectionate and loves to cuddle, and she's happy and playful and likes lots of games. She's just an easy, fun little girl.

I'll post some videos of our training and play sessions next time.

Introducing Anica!

Yesterday we picked up Temporary Dog #28: a six-month-old female Border Terrier mix named Anica. Currently she's about 20 pounds, which means her adult weight is likely to come in at somewhere in the 25-27 pound range once she fills out and develops a little more muscle. At the moment she's a bit underweight, probably from shelter stress.

Anica landed in a North Carolina shelter when her previous owner, who had acquired her as a puppy, decided that he didn't have the time or energy for a dog. He dropped her off at the shelter, where she was pulled by our rescue partners and slated for transport up to PA. After a couple of weeks with our rescue partners, she made her way up here.

She's only been here for a little over 24 hours, so it's premature for me to try making any detailed evaluations at this point. So far, however, Anica seems to be a great little dog: affectionate, snuggly, gentle, and very very sweet. She's been sociable and polite with Dog Mob -- even though, as usual, Pongu's not making that easy for her. (Last night Pongu decided to rush up to Anica's crate and yell at her every single time he heard a noise he didn't like, whether or not it came from her. Pongu yelled at her for scratching, whining, and shifting position in her sleep, but he also yelled at her because there was a truck with squeaky brakes outside, or because Peter opened the bedroom door to use the bathroom, or because Pongu was having a bad dream and clearly that was all Anica's fault.)

The first order of business, as usual, has been potty training, crate training, and leash walking. I can't tell whether Anica has had any formal training on any of these points or if she's just a naturally easygoing dog; either way, she seems to be catching on pretty quickly. We did have a potty accident last night, but so far it's only been the one, and she's pottied outside pretty consistently since then. She's been mostly quiet in the crate apart from occasional sighs and complaints when she gets bored.

Anica has been fairly easy on leash -- I've just been walking her on a flat collar, no need for a front-clip harness so far -- and seems to be rapidly getting used to walks in the city, although she has shown a tendency to snap up dropped food on the sidewalks and I suspect she's going to be pretty interested in squirrels once she's a little more comfortable. But no big problems on that front, at least not in the first day.

My very broad preliminary assessment is that she's a sweet and easy dog with no major issues. Anica would be a good choice for a novice owner or for a family looking for a child-friendly pet. I think she could do well as either a second dog or an only pet; she's dog-social and enjoys playing with other dogs, but she doesn't seem to be overly needy. I haven't seen any signs of separation anxiety or resource guarding at this time (although SA sometimes needs a little longer to manifest; this early, she's not bonded to me and therefore doesn't get too worried when I'm not around).

So that's the first look at Anica. We'll start foundational training either tonight or tomorrow, and hopefully we'll be able to find a nice home for this little dog before too long.

Summer Vacation 2015

We're (probably) getting a new foster dog in a couple of days, so time to dust off the old dog blog! I haven't updated in a while because Pongu's no longer actively trialing (we took the year off Rally and our agility plans crashed and burned when I got sidetracked doing book stuff earlier this spring; we haven't really recovered from that setback, training-wise).

But everyone's still here and doing well otherwise. Here are some pictures from Dog Mob's summer vacation. We got back from Nantucket a couple of weeks ago. As ever, they had a great time and we can't wait to go back.

Happy Valentine's With Pongu!

Pongu and I finished his goofy little Valentine's Day trick yesterday, about a week ahead of schedule. We haven't been able to make it to agility class the last few weeks because of terrible weather (which, for some reason, always hits on Mondays lately) and we're not training in Rally or obedience anymore, so once I figured out a trick that Pongu could actually do, it went pretty quickly.

My how-to post on teaching this one (well, part of it, anyhow) is scheduled to go up on Team Unruly in about a week. Till then, Happy Valentine's from Pongu!

(And Crooky, too, even if he didn't get so much as a cameo this time.)

Scarlett Goes Home

Well, it's been a few days and her adopters haven't called to send her back yet, so I guess I can make the official "foster dog's been adopted!" post.

Last week Scarlett met with two sets of prospective adopters. Either family would have been a good and loving home for her, I'm sure; both prospective adopters seemed to be willing and prepared to help her get back to good health.

So really it came down to which family Scarlett seemed to click with more strongly, as best I could try to guess that within the limitations of a 30-minute initial meeting.

She liked both of them, but she seemed a little more comfortable and cuddly with the first family. And then it turned out that the second adopter wasn't able to take her anyway, owing to an accidental injury shortly after their meeting with Scarlett, so my decision ended up being pretty easy after all.

On Saturday morning she went home.

It sounds like Scarlett's doing pretty well there and has made herself a part of the family already, so I'm very hopeful that this placement will turn out better for her than the last one did, and that maybe this little dog will have a permanent, loving home for real this time.

Scarlett Goes to the Vet

This morning Scarlett went to my regular vet to get her tapeworms treated and a number of other issues checked out.

I realized she had tapeworms on Saturday when I found the distinctly unpleasant egg casings on her poop. Tapeworms are the easiest of the common worms to treat (it's pretty much a one-and-done pill treatment, whereas most of the other worms require several days or even weeks of deworming medication), but in my opinion they are by far the grossest. Like, not even close.

So as soon as I saw that, I called up my vet, because I was not going to wait to see the rescue vet. Nope. No way. I will pay all kinds of premiums to not have tapeworms in my house.

I also wanted to have several other issues checked: the patchy hair loss, the persistently itchy skin, a gauge of just how underweight Scarlett was, and so forth.

Scarlett was an absolute sweetheart at the vet. She didn't hassle the other dogs or cats in the waiting room (although she did tilt her head curiously whenever she heard a meow), she was sweet and polite with the vet tech, she let both the vet and the tech manipulate her legs and look at her teeth and get her up on the weighing table without a squeak of protest, and all in all she was a model patient. This puppy really does have a wonderful temperament, and she showed it during that visit.

The health news wasn't great, but it was better than I expected.

She does have tapeworms (which I already knew) and the vet prescribed medication for that. A skin scrape ruled out mange (good!). Allergies remain a possibility, but the vet thought it was more likely that her skin issues were caused by a bacterial infection (her lymph nodes were significantly swollen and the red bumps along her belly and inner thighs are consistent with a bacterial skin infection), so Scarlett has a course of antibiotics to get through and a bottle of medicated shampoo to alleviate some of the itching and dandruff.

I also submitted a stool sample for a fecal test, the results of which are expected back on Wednesday.

So the good news is that all of this stuff should be eminently treatable. The bad news is that she was ever allowed to get into this condition in the first place. It remains unfathomable to me that an owned dog could live in someone's home for two months and wind up this underweight, with tapeworms and an untreated skin infection, before finally being returned to the rescue.

When we got home, Scarlett got her first of probably many medicated baths. She was not excited. She did, however, accept her miserable fate with as much dignity as possible (which was, sadly, not a lot).

And that's where we are on the health front for now. She is putting on some weight, at least. Today she clocked in at 36 pounds, which is far from excellent but at least represents some improvement.

In other news, Scarlett is also not excited about the cold and damp weather we've been having. She hates walking through the snow and picks her feet up ridiculously high in a futile attempt to avoid it, although she absolutely loves eating snow and will run around hunting down particularly tasty drifts. If we get a half-decent dump from the blizzard that's supposed to be coming in tonight, I'll take her out to see how she does in deep snow.

This week Scarlett is scheduled to start meeting with prospective adopters. It's my hope that we find her a good match and a real home soon.

Scarlett - First Four Days

We're about midway through our first week with foster dog Scarlett, and things are going pretty much as one might expect. Currently she's spending a lot of time in the crate, which I don't love (particularly as my crate is a bit too small for her), but until we get potty training handled, there's no good way around it.

The good news is that we're making solid progress on the potty training front. Either Scarlett was pretty much housebroken at her previous home, and she just had a temporary regression here, or she's a quick learner. In either case, we're quickly reaching an understanding that outside is for pottying and inside is not.

Less-good news is that Scarlett is prone to submissive urination. She pees a little whenever the other dogs are mean to her, and since Pongu is a giant bully dickhead to foster dogs, that means Scarlett invariably widdles on my floor within five minutes of coming inside, even if she pottied successfully on the walk, because it never takes more than five minutes for Pongu to start being a jerk to her.

So it would be a lie if I said that she hadn't had any accidents, but the only reason she has accidents is because Pongu makes a point of being mean to Scarlett until she pees herself (at which point she goes back in the box and Pongu gloats mightily at her woe), and I don't know if that counts. If you took out the "resident dog is a giant wiener" factor, Scarlett would have a pretty good track record.

She has a pretty good Sit-Stay even in outdoor environments with another dog nearby. It's very much a beginner Sit-Stay, but it's there, and I can't take any credit for that one because she already knew how to do it when she got here. Improving on that is just going to be a matter of practice and proofing -- Scarlett clearly has the basic concept down, she just needs work on distance, distractions, and duration.

She's also very good at walking on leash now. Not totally perfect, but easy enough that I can take all three dogs out for a walk, hold their leashes on one hand (one finger per leash!) if necessary, and it's sufficiently non-annoying that I can walk them around for an hour-plus and still be mostly sane at the end of it.

I think she's beginning to put on weight, but it's too early for me to feel sure about that yet.

When she got here, Scarlett was (and still is) visibly underweight. Her bones stuck out all over, she had bad flaky dandruff and patches of hair loss, she scratched herself constantly, and she had kennel cough. All in all I was pretty worried when I saw her, because she looked like a straight shelter pull, not a dog who'd been living in a home for two months. Her former owner had told me that Scarlett was eating 5 cups of kibble plus fish oil supplements every day, and it was hard for me to square that with the obviously undernourished dog I received.

That's more than twice what I feed my dogs (Pongu and Crooky came at 63 and 72 pounds at their last weigh-ins, and they get about 2 cups of kibble apiece per day), so I thought that if this puppy was eating that much and still looked so skinny, then she must have some metabolic disorder and possible food allergies. That could be a real problem -- allergies, in particular, can be an extremely expensive and troublesome proposition that could put off a lot of adopters. Dobermans are known to be prone to such problems, and Scarlett epitomizes poor breeding, so it wouldn't be a surprise at all if she turned out to have those issues. If she did, then I'd be faced with trying to place a special-needs dog, which could be a real headache.

The jury is still out as to whether Scarlett does in fact have allergies or disorders. But I've been giving her slightly over 2 cups of kibble per day, plus raw food supplements and treats, and in the few days that I've had her, it appears that her dandruff is getting better, she doesn't smell as strongly as she did on arrival, her energy level has gone up, and her weight seems (I think) to be increasing. Her kennel cough is also improving; she barely coughs at all anymore, except when we've been out on a long walk (we do a lot of long walks to improve her stamina and leash manners).

So it's possible -- fingers crossed! -- that either Scarlett's previous diet didn't agree with her, or her adopter's report wasn't entirely accurate, and we're not dealing with major food intolerance issues. But at this point that's just a possibility, I haven't seen enough to feel sure about anything yet.

(^ not the best picture I got from that attempt, but the one that makes me laugh the most. Pongu's forlorn eye roll that Scarlett can't hold a Sit on the stairs is hilarious to me.)

Aaaalso, this dog sings prison blues in her crate constantly. She isn't crying or whining to get out. She's just... grumbling, talking to herself, occasionally sighing in discontent, and otherwise offering a running commentary on the whole world from the box. It isn't especially loud (hardly any barking, at least so far) and it's generally pretty funny, but it is striking how completely quiet Scarlett is outside the crate, and how vocal she is when she's inside. So far, the talky/grumbly/jailhouse blues singing thing hasn't diminished at all, so I guess her prospective adopters should probably be prepared for a certain amount of crate commentary in their lives.

Scarlett Comes (Back) to Philly

Yesterday we got Temporary Dog #27: a five-month-old purebred red Doberman puppy named Scarlett.

This is actually Scarlett's second time through Wags. She was originally adopted out as a 12-week-old puppy back in November 2014 and was placed with a very nice family in Connecticut. Back then, her name was "Harper Paisley," which is still the name on her internal paperwork at the rescue (so if anyone is wondering why the dog has two names, that's the reason! Harper was her original rescue name and Scarlett is the name that she actually knows and answers to).

Unfortunately, her adoptive family fell into some severe and unforeseeable troubles and was forced to return her to the rescue. So, at five months old, Scarlett is now back with the rescue group and once again looking for a home.

I've only had Scarlett for a little less than 24 hours, so it's very early to make even preliminary assessments of her temperament or personality at this stage. Here's what I can say so far, though:

-- She has kennel cough right now. She also appears to be a little underweight (although it's possible that this is just teenage puppy gawkiness) and has dry skin with some dandruff.

In response, I've changed her diet from Blue Buffalo kibble (which is what her adopter had been feeding her -- that's a good-quality brand, but it's possible that formulation might just not have agreed with the puppy) and switched her to Acana kibble supplemented with the same variety of canned foods, home-cooked foods, and raw foods that my dogs eat. I also gave her an apple cider vinegar rinse this morning to hopefully cut down on some of Scarlett's "doggy odor." We'll see if any of these things help.

-- Housebreaking is very much a work in progress. Given her young age and the culture shock of transitioning from Connecticut to the middle of Philly, however, this isn't too surprising. I'm hopeful that this will prove to be a temporary regression and we'll be out of this phase soon.

-- She's very dog-social and playful with other dogs of all breeds and sizes. Scarlett seems to love the company of other dogs. She's also friendly with children and seeks them out for cuddling and attention. I'd have no concerns placing her in a household with normal, sociable dogs or kids.

I'm not as confident about how she'd do with cats; my impression at this stage is that she would be fine living with familiar indoor cats but might be tempted to chase outdoor or barn cats. However, I'm not going to make any promises on that front this early. I haven't had her around enough cats or small animals yet to feel sure about that.

-- Scarlett seems to be familiar with leash walking and is doing nicely on her EasyWalk harness (although she can be a bit bouncy when she first comes out of her crate and has energy to burn). She seems to know "Sit" and defaults to it with just a little bit of hesitation.

-- I've seen no signs of resource guarding, separation anxiety, unwarranted aggression, or other obvious behavioral problems.

Overall my impression at this early stage is that Scarlett will likely make a wonderful pet for a family that understands and enjoys the highly affiliative, goofy-but-intense, occasionally distractible Dobie personality. Her adopters should be prepared to engage in some form of lifelong activity to keep her brain and body engaged -- whether it's a formal sport like agility or just frequent hikes in new environments, this puppy is going to need something beyond backyard games of fetch to stay happy -- and should also be prepared for lots of positive socialization throughout her adolescence and young adulthood to keep her comfortable around strange people and, especially, strangers coming into her home.

At this point I don't know yet whether I would recommend her as a performance prospect. Her caution in new environments is very pronounced at this stage, and one of the effects of that is that she tends to investigate new areas with a hunched posture and all her weight on her back legs. This distorts her gait and conformation enough that I don't feel comfortable trying to evaluate that myself (admittedly, structural evaluations are not my strongest point, and a more experienced eye might be able to see things that I'm missing... but I can't, so I don't want to make any representations about Scarlett's structure until I've been able to see her more evened out). I also haven't seen enough to feel comfortable assessing her mental qualities for performance yet.

So that's where we are after our first day together. I hope to hang onto Scarlett for the standard two weeks in order to do a more thorough evaluation and hopefully match her to the perfect home. Beyond that, though, it's my hope that we'll be able to place her with a loving forever family very soon.

Two-Month Countdown

Yesterday I dropped Pongu's very first CPE agility trial entry in the mail, and today the mail carrier came and took it away, so I can't break into the office mailbox and steal it back anymore. No chance for second thoughts!

So we are scheduled to have our Official Agility Trial Debut on Saturday, January 24, at Bella Vista. We're entered in two Standard runs and one Colors run. I have no idea what a "Colors run" actually is, other than what I've gleaned from reading my friends' blog posts on the topic, but honestly my comprehension is not that great so I still have pretty much no clue what that means on the ground. I guess I'll find out.

I'm not expecting greatness. Bella Vista is (I think?) a good choice for our agility debut, since Pongu has trialed there many times for Rally and he's got a mostly-good performance record at that venue. Far from flawless, but about as good as it ever gets for my wildly inconsistent, anxiety-raddled crazydog. I'm told that the judge is a good one for newbies, too, so that helps. And we're only doing three runs, and I tried to pick the easier course options, so that ought to help as well.

But we've only been training in agility since... August maybe? ...and that means it will be just about six months from the time that Pongu and I took our first class in this sport until our first attempt at trialing. Even given that he's got some experience in other sports, and even allowing for the relative ease of CPE Level 1, that's not nearly long enough for me to have any reasonable expectation that we'll Q.

I still want to try it, though. I want to see how Pongu does in a new environment (which this will be for him -- he's been there for Rally, but he's never been there when the place was set up for agility), with the noise and adrenaline of an agility trial surrounding him, on unfamiliar equipment for the first time.

If he can handle it, I think we should have an okay-ish chance of maybe qualifying in one out of our three runs. If I stay close to Pongu and give him a whole lot of support going over each obstacle and never veer away until he's over each jump and through each contact zone, then in two months, we might have a chance.

Or we might not! I have no idea! Both of us are green as green can be. Seasick frogs, leprechaun Packers fans, you get the idea. Pongu's never done more than about 6 to 8 obstacles in sequence, and most of his fake course practice has been at the Zoom Room, where the obstacles are significantly smaller than regulation size and packed much more tightly together.

Examples:

I know we're not really ready. I don't think we'll be ready in two months, either. I can't read a course map worth a damn, my handling is a perpetual thing of sadness, and my dog is still terrified of half the obstacles on the course.

But I think that part of how we're going to get ready is by doing this trial as an experiment. I want to see what I can get from Pongu in a real live trial environment. And I want to see what it's like, too. I've never even been to a CPE trial myself; every time this fall that there was one reasonably close for me to watch, we had a conflict with a Rally trial or some other project, so I couldn't go.

So we'll just go and try to have fun and see how it goes. Let the countdown begin.

Silver Goes Home, Pongu Finishes His MX2

Last Friday, Silver went home with a couple of awesome adopters.

It's been the better part of a week and they haven't called yet to say that they're sending her back, so I guess it's safe to say at this point that she has officially been Adopted! and is, hopefully, off to a happily-ever-after.

All the best to you, little dog. Have a great life.

On Saturday, Pongu and I drove up to Andover NJ to finish up his ARCHMX2 championship (and his RL1X7, because eh, why not).

I don't have a whole lot to say about that one. It was an unspectacular performance; Pongu barely scraped out a triple Q in his first set of runs. He's frequently stressy at that venue, it was an extremely cold morning, we had Crooky in the car because Peter was out of town that weekend, and I hadn't slept at all the night before. All in all, neither Pongu nor I was in great form at that trial.

His fronts and finishes were quick and straight, and his heeling was actually pretty good (lots of head drops, but his position was better and more consistent than I've ever gotten at a trial before), but Pongu was too anxious to pay attention to my cues, so he kept guessing what I wanted and often he'd guess wrong. I got a couple of missed fronts where he went straight to a finish instead, a couple of reluctant Downs where he only went partway down and then popped back up into a Sit, a finish instead of a backup on the Level 3 bonus exercise, and... just a bunch of stuff like that. No broken Stays or blown jumps, so no NQs, but our scores were pretty sad.

But Pongu did finish his MX2 in the first set of runs, even if he did cut it close.

I scratched the second set because I had to get back to work and also, with zero sleep, I was legitimately concerned about being a road hazard on the way back if we stayed the whole time. It was shaping up to be a long trial, and I didn't think I could handle another four to six hours of being awake before trying to drive home in the dark. Probably Pongu would have done better on his second set of runs after having had a few more hours to acclimatize, but oh well, didn't happen.

We have a couple more Rally trials in December, but nothing else big on the horizon. Pongu's MX2 is the only major title he had left to finish this year. I aaalmost wish he hadn't gotten it so that we could have finished it at our home club on December 7, but then I would have had to stress about "what if he misses it? what if we don't get a triple Q?" and so it's probably better to just have that worry off the table.

Pongu is the 13th mixed-breed dog in the history of the world to finish the ARCHMX2 title, the 60th dog overall, and the 10th dog in all breeds to get it this year. (Those last two achievements might need asterisks, though, as there were two other dogs who also won their MX2s that same weekend, and I have no idea which of them actually was first in time.)

Hoo-ray. I guess I should finally think about putting up another ribbon board in my office.

Silver Gets Ready to Go Home

We are winding down our time with Silver. Tomorrow she's scheduled to go home with wonderful adopters, and I hope she'll go on to have an amazing life. I always feel so lucky to be able to help these little guys move from a desperately bad situation to some of the most caring and committed homes in the world. Where they go is lightyears better than where they've been, and every time I place a dog, I'm thrilled for that dog and sad for the others who didn't roll such a lucky number in life's lottery.

But anyway.

In her last few days here, we haven't really been working on anything new. Some other stuff popped up over the past week or so that's unfortunately derailed a lot of my attention away from training the foster dog, so poor Silver has mostly been on the back burner this week.

One of the things we have been working on is impulse control in outdoor environments, also known as "not freaking out and losing your mind when another dog walks by on the sidewalk, plz kthx." On Sunday, Silver suddenly started jumping and barking at other dogs she saw around our neighborhood. I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, except that it seems to be some stripe of excitement/frustration/territorialness and not a fear reaction. Which is good, because excitement is much easier to fix than fear.

So we've spent some time figuring out Silver's threshold distances (i.e., how close she can be to another dog before she starts losing her mind) and then working on various alternative incompatible behaviors at or below threshold distance. I'm prompting her for attention, immediately rewarding that, and then either prompting for a Sit or a quick, happy walk away from the other dog, depending on which is more appropriate in that particular situation. If the dog is already moving away from us, I ask for a Sit. If the dog is either staying in place or moving toward us, then I prompt Silver to move away.

That gets rewarded too: once we're sufficiently far away and Silver is paying enough attention to me, I throw a big party of treats and praise and a little bit of chase/tag play or petting depending on whether I want to ramp her up or calm her down.

After three days of this, we've made enough progress that we're pretty much back to where we were on Sunday right before she started reacting at all. We took this picture on a side street this morning with another dog about 40 feet away on a cross street:

...and that was one of five or six pictures I was able to get with only the briefest diversions of eye contact away from me. Silver held that Sit for almost a full minute and was, with only sporadic reinforcement (because I was trying to take pictures and couldn't rapid-fire treats the whole time), able to ignore the other dog at that distance.

I am, accordingly, pretty confident that her adopters should be able to get a handle on this behavior without too much trouble. They seem to be pretty on top of things, and Silver is not a dog that I'd currently characterize as "reactive." Her behavior is no worse than what I've seen from many, many excitable sport dogs on the competition circuit. You can't have a firecracker that doesn't throw a few sparks!

But, on the flipside, it is an issue that we're dealing with right now, and it is not hard to accidentally make reactive behavior worse by putting the dog over threshold or turning it into full-blown defensive aggression by employing punishment at the wrong times (these borderline excitement/frustration cases are really, really one of those situations where if you are going to use punishment, getting the timing right is super important -- one of many reasons I don't choose to go that way), so it's definitely not a place where you'd want to go "okay, problem solved" and just ignore it. This is going to need continued work to strengthen and maintain.

Also Silver met a cat today:

She was reaaaally fascinated with that cat. I think she was as amazed by the invisible forcefield protecting the cat, and the cat's resultant fearlessness, as the presence of the cat itself. Silver is still a little bit confused about glass doors (she's finally stopped walking facefirst into the glass doors around our condo, but that took about a week, and I can see her get confused by other glass doors that she encounters on walks), and this glassed-in viewing portal just about blew her mind.

On the health front, I'm keeping an eye on the two raw spots on her legs. When she arrived, she had a ton of little nicks and cuts all over her front legs and paw pads. I'll never know for sure how she got them, but I would guess that she probably picked up those cuts while wandering around in the woods. It can be a rough life for a dog out there.

Most of her cuts healed up within the first week, but she's got two that are not healing like the others, and I'm starting to wonder if she's been worrying at them and turning them into hot spots. I haven't caught her licking or chewing at them, but it's possible that she's been doing that in the crate while I'm at work and can't watch her. The spots themselves appear inconclusive at this time -- they're not definitely hot spots to my eye, but they also aren't definitely not hot spots. If they persist for more than a week post-adoption, or if they get any worse, that might warrant a look from a vet.

Finally, she's been spending a lot of time playing biteyface with Crookytail, up until Pongu intervenes and ruins their games (which he always does, because Pongu thinks playing is Against The Rules):

And that's more or less where we are as we start wrapping up Silver's stint as a foster dog. Tomorrow morning I'll pack up her tiny suitcase, and tomorrow afternoon she is scheduled to go home.

End of Week One with Silver

We're coming to the end of our first week with Silver.

Training is going well. She's pretty good on a loose leash (she's started pulling toward other dogs, but this is normal and is typically just a phase that lasts until she realizes that it never works and only good behavior ever gets anything), potty training is progressing nicely (we're now down to approx. 10 minutes of walking around outside before she potties, and there have been zero accidents since that first rainy day), and she's beginning to do a default Sit at the door to go outside instead of trying to jump up and scratch at it to get me to open the door. Her "Sit" is starting to transition to a pure verbal cue without any hand gestures.

She still cries in the crate a little when she's bored, but this has been steadily diminishing for the past several days and I'm pretty sure it will vanish altogether by the end of next week. Crate crying is a behavior that has a high chance of regressing when she moves to a new environment, though, so her adopters should probably be prepared to start all over again on that one. As far as I can tell, it's just run-of-the-mill "I'm bored/lonely/have to potty and I want to get out" crying, not indicative of separation anxiety. Silver has shown no separation anxiety while I've had her, and by this point I would have expected it to start showing up at least a little bit if she had that issue.

One important caveat there is that I can't tell if she has isolation distress. I don't think she does (I haven't seen any signs of it), but I can't make a 100% guarantee about that one.

(Footnote explanation: These terms are often used interchangeably, especially in quick-and-dirty "training 101" materials on the Internet, but they actually refer to two slightly different things. Separation anxiety refers to a dog who becomes distressed upon being separated from a specific person or creature. The presence of a different person or creature does not console the dog. Pongu might be considered to have separation anxiety, because he only cares if I'm around; he does not care if anybody else is around. The presence of any other person or animal, even if it's Peter the Spousal Unit or Crookytail, does nothing to make him feel better. If I'm not there, he gets panicky. That's classic separation anxiety.

Isolation distress refers to an animal who becomes distress upon being isolated from all other people or creatures. The animal is not attached to one (or two) specific person(s) or animal(s), and can therefore be consoled by having another familiar creature around. Crookytail used to be like this when we first got him: if he was left alone, he would panic. If he had another person or dog around -- even if the other dog was Pongu, who was just a complete jerk to him back then [not that this has changed] -- then he was okay. Because Crooky is not actually a crazy dog, he got over this on his own within a couple of months as he became more comfortable in our home and more accustomed to our routines, but we did have a few months there where he really didn't like to be left totally alone and would very carefully wreck one thing every time he was isolated for more than a few minutes.)

The reason I can't be 100% sure about Silver and isolation distress is because, at least so far, she's never been totally alone while I've had her. Either Peter or one of the other dogs has always been around. I honestly do not think this is an issue for her, but I'll note it in the interest of full disclosure: that's a potential blind spot in my evaluation.

Everything I can evaluate, however, leads me to believe that she's an awesome little pet dog. She really hits that balance of playful and mellow that everybody asks for, she's picking up good manners at a quick clip, and she's appropriately sociable with everyone and everything I've introduced her to so far (by which I mean: she doesn't mug people for attention but she doesn't cringe or snap either. Friendly neutrality and occasional curiosity seems to be her default attitude, which is exactly what I think makes for the easiest dogs).

As to whether she'd be suited for dog sports... eh, I think it's still too early to tell on that front.

I did introduce her to Lotus Balls a few days ago. This is her first attempt:

...and then we started doing some suuuuper basic introductions to a bar jump. This is her third session overall, second one where the bar wasn't just flat on the ground (it's raised about 3 inches in this clip).

Silver has a good, quick recovery from being startled by the noise when she crashes into the bar and knocks it off the cups, and she's easy to motivate with food, either indoors or outdoors. She has pretty decent interest in toys (both chase and tug toys) but I haven't really attempted to use toys as motivators or built up her play skills in any serious fashion. I don't imagine it would be difficult, I just haven't put the time in to do that.

Her attention span is increasing noticeably even over the course of this first week and our training sessions are beginning to get a little more structured, which is nice.

So that's pretty much where we are at the end of this first week. Silver has meetings with two sets of prospective adopters this weekend. Both seem like very nice homes and I'm hopeful that she'll hit it off with one or both.

Day Four: Silver Starts Training

Day Four with Silver, and we're finally to a place where we can do some foundational training.

The first order of business with a new foster dog is always housebreaking (and, because we live in the middle of the city with no yard, loose-leash walking -- as a practical matter, we always end up working on those two skills in combination). I can't really do much indoor training with a dog who might pee in my kitchen at any moment, so formal training has to wait until we've got the potty situation at least marginally under control.

Fortunately, Silver crossed that threshold yesterday.

We are, as usual, following Sue Sternberg's potty training protocol. I take Silver outside regularly and walk her around for a while until she potties. Every time she potties, she gets free run of the house for 15 minutes, plus another 15 minutes for each day that passes without an accident (so 30 minutes on the second day, 45 minutes on the third day, etc.). Then she goes back into the crate until it's time to go outside again.

Currently it takes her about 20 minutes of walking around outside to get relaxed enough to potty, but she's been pretty consistent about that for the past couple of days, and probably that time will go down as she gets more comfortable with the city. There haven't been any potty accidents since her first day here, which was a super stormy and windy day and probably scared her enough that she couldn't make herself go. Other than that one unusually blustery day, we really haven't had any trouble.

I'd be lying if I said she was totally potty trained, but she's making very good progress, and I don't anticipate that her adopters will have any trouble finishing the job.

So, now that we've accomplished a minimum level of reliability, this morning I started introducing the clicker.

Here's a short video of an early session (we're eventually going to be working on establishing Sit as a default behavior, but Silver doesn't really understand that yet -- this is very much a snapshot of the learning process in its earliest stages, not the finished product):

It's too early to tell how she'll take to it, but we'll play around with shaping/capturing/luring games for however long I've got to work with this little muppet. I'm toying with the idea of starting her on agility jump drills (seems like a thing she might enjoy, and I need the practice), but Silver has a cut on one of her paw pads that's causing her to limp right now, so that may not be such a great idea at the moment.

I feel like she has a lot of promise to be a fun little starter sport dog. Again, it's too soon to be sure, but I do feel like Silver has it in her to be a firecracker, if her eventual owners decide to go that way with her.

Tuesday night, she had her first visit to the local dog park. It went pretty well. The park was mostly empty when we arrived (which was good, as it gave Pongu a chance to do a little bit of agility practice) and then suddenly filled up with a lot of new owners who really hadn't done much with their dogs (like, to the point where said dogs actually tore holes in my shirt jumping on me because they were trying to mug me for treats, and of course paid no attention to their owners' half-hearted attempts to get them off).

(I put the jumps away because, given the environment and crowding, it wasn't safe to practice those, and reverted to Rally practice instead. Pongu held his Heel perfectly throughout this level of distraction and, indeed, never broke eye contact even while unruly dogs were jumping on me and trying to hump him. I AM SO PROUD OF HIM. <3 <3 <3)

Anyway, Silver was great at the dog park, played appropriately with all the dogs she encountered -- many of whom were perfectly nice but also totally untrained -- and was quick to break away if I indicated that I might want to work with her. She followed me out of the park without being called when it was time to go, and waited patiently to be harnessed up with the rest of Dog Mob. I was very pleased with her behavior on that first visit.

She also showed a lot of interest in Pongu's agility work. Maybe I should get going on those jump drills with her after all...

Three Days With Silver

It's been three days since Silver came to stay with us, and she's starting to emerge from her shell.

I'll be honest: the first 24 hours that we had her, I was a leeetle bit underwhelmed with this dog. Silver was super shut down and pancake-y when she first arrived. On the ride home from Newark, she just sat on the far side of the car seat by herself, showing no apparent interest in engaging with me or looking around her surroundings. She flat-out refused to go down the dark scary stairs in the parking garage (we ended up having to take the freight elevator) and she wasn't a whole lot more enthusiastic about the stairs in the condo.

She just had no confidence whatsoever. And while this is not at all unusual, and plenty of our foster dogs have been pancake-y and overwhelmed those first few days, it does make for a tough introductory period. Silver was initially so withdrawn that I wasn't sure what to expect from her. I try really hard to avoid picking shy or fearful dogs -- the whole reason I got into fostering in the first place was to ensure that other adopters didn't accidentally wind up with their own little Pongus -- and for a minute there I was worried that I might have gotten one.

Happily, I was wrong. On Sunday, Silver started coming out of her shell. She got over her terror of the stairs (thanks in no small part to Crooky modeling casual confidence for her and showing that the stairs were not, in fact, a secret treacherous deathtrap for unsuspecting dogs, but were actually a great way to coax cookies out of me). She got more comfortable about walking on leash outside.

On Sunday night I took her out to the parking garage to run around with Dog Mob. I had to go out there anyway to do some agility homework with Pongu, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to let Silver blow off some steam by slamming herself into the concrete a bunch of times (...or something).

Mostly I just wanted to see what she would do without much guidance from me. What were her natural inclinations? Did she have the natural impulse control to hold a basically untrained Sit with the other dogs nearby? Would she follow me around the parking garage if I dropped her leash and didn't do anything to coax or cajole her either way? What kind of dog did I have on my hands?

Here's how that went:

Silver held a completely untrained Sit-Stay for five seconds, with other dogs nearby, knowing that those other dogs were (nominally) available to play with (although not really, as the video shows). That is amazing. To me, a dog who can do that right off the bat on her very first try, with zero formal training on Sits or Stays or anything else, is a remarkable dog.

Then she played with Crooky (Pongu, as usual, wanted no part of this frivolous nonsense). Good enthusiasm, a little uncertainty, a lot of rolling over and other appeasement signals. This was their first time playing together, though, and she consistently went back to re-engage him and didn't seem overly stressed or worried, so I view that as a very promising first session. A few times Silver ran back to me and dodged Crooky around my legs, which I also interpret as highly promising (since at this point we have no real relationship).

She did follow me around the parking garage unprompted, even while playing with the other dogs. I never had to chase her down to get her back at the end of each play session; she came back freely each time, even with no recall training.

It was a good session. Silver was a little squeaky and protest-ful when I tied her to a pole so Pongu could do his agility homework, but nothing terrible.

On Monday I took her out for a 90-minute walk around Old City and Society Hill. Silver is very good at walking on a loose leash now; she stayed by my side almost the entire time with no pulling except once when she wanted to greet a puggle (which I didn't allow because I don't want to start setting a precedent where she thinks she gets to greet every dog on the street. Noooo. We ignore the other dogs on the street).

Then we went home and I let her sit around on the deck while I harvested one of my fabric pots full of carrots, because she hadn't pottied outside and I was resigned to letting her go on the deck just to get it over with before I left for work.

She never did, though. She just lazed in the sun and watched me.

Carrots: not very interesting to the foster dog.

So that's where we are heading into our first week together. I'm hoping to be able to start formal training soon. I did a little introductory clicker work during our walk, but out on walks is not the optimal environment to introduce that concept, and until she gets more reliable about pottying outside, we can't do a whole lot of work inside.

Hopefully soon, though.

In the meantime she's turning out to be a pretty great little dog. Easily engaged, enthusiastic, fun and playful, but content to lie around patiently if I'm not actively trying to do stuff with her. Highly dog-social, but good at turning that on and off.

She'll make a really nice dog for someone.

Hi-ho, Silver!

Last night at 1 a.m., we drove out on a cold and blustery Halloween night to a rest stop in Newark, Delaware, to collect Temporary Dog #26: Silver!

It was a slightly terrifying drive. Halloween must be a much bigger DUI holiday than I realized. We saw two incredibly nasty wrecks on the way there and back; judging from the recency of the glass and machine parts spilled across the Interstate, the number of emergency personnel on the scene, and the lack of backed-up traffic, we must have missed each accident by mere minutes.

One of them was a three-car accident where two cars were damaged and the third was completely destroyed. The other was a one-car accident where somebody somehow dodged between two guard rails and smashed into an overpass support pillar at an insanely high rate of speed. The car was just crumpled and the back end was sticking out into the air at a crazy angle, it was like something out of a movie. No way did whoever was in that car survive that one.

So that was a little scary. But we made it safely out to Newark and we made it safely back, and our drive was pretty uneventful. Around 3:30 a.m. we brought this little muppet back to Philly:

Silver is a mystery mutt from Robeson County, North Carolina, where she was picked up as a stray wandering along the side of the road. One of my Facebook friends guessed that she might be a whippet/husky mix, and that's as good a guess as I can come up with (both in terms of her appearance/build and what I've been able to discern of her personality so far), so we'll go with it. In truth, though, that is a total guess and I have no real idea what her breed mix might be.

She's about 35 pounds, which is a healthy weight (maaaybe she could stand to gain another 1-2 pounds of muscle, but she really doesn't need much more). Good athletic build. Very sweet disposition, gentle and tolerant of body handling. Highly dog-social; she's tried her best to ingratiate herself with Dog Mob and make friends with Crookytail while avoiding Pongu's wrath. I no longer have a guinea pig (RIP, little dude), so I haven't been able to see how she does with other types of pets; I'll probably have to make an educated guess based on how she reacts to whatever we encounter on walks over the next few days.

At the moment, Silver is completely overwhelmed by culture shock, so I have not yet had an opportunity to get a clear read on her personality. We're just going to take it slow for a few days and give her some time to get more comfortable with the huge change from rural North Carolina to the middle of Philly.

The first order of business is to get her accustomed to walking on leash (her first night was a disaster -- I have never seen a dog wind herself around so many light posts in such short order! -- but she's picking it up quickly, and I feel pretty confident that she'll have the basic idea down in a few more days) and pottying outside. Crooky is being a big help in teaching her both of those things, and she seems to be grateful for his TA'ing her crash course in City Dog Life 101.

After she relaxes a bit more, we'll start work on basic manners and figure out what sort of home would be a good fit for her, and then maybe if I have time and she shows any inclination, we'll goof around with some other training games.

Too early for any of that yet, though. She's still settling in.