What I was told

One thing I wish someone had told me when I rehomed the dog was this: Don’t believe what the previous owners tell you. It’s not necessarily that they are lying. But they don’t know this dog. That’s why they want to get rid of him.

I was told he is never aggressive. Granted, he doesn’t bite, but he guards and protects and threatens and barks and lunges in ways that are sometimes not funny. It’s part of the talking, but he has to learn how to cut it out at some point, or he is not going to make a lot of friends.

I was told this is a one man dog who doesn’t get along with women or other people. Well. That one was obvious nonsense from the start. Dogs are not like that. And this one in particular has excellent relationships with lots of people, most of them are women. If anything, he is slightly suspicious of men.

I was told he is lazy and is happy to just sleep for most of the day. I’m sorry, but lazy is not in the job description of a Malamute. I’ve never seen him slowing down or unwilling to go further or faster. He may have been lazy out of necessity in his old home, because he was frustrated and sad. But given a chance, he will run to the North Pole.

I was told he cannot eat anything except this one brand of kibble, or he will throw up. Needless to say, that’s just wrong. He is completely comfortable with all food I’ve so far thrown at him. Plus a lot of food that he found on the road. This includes plastic bags. He has some issues with the hard bits in seaweed, but I guess that’s understandable.

Occasionally he does get an upset stomach in the morning. He tells me by coming into my bed, sitting near my head, and licking his lips. It’s his word for ‘I need to go outside to throw up’. Very gentle and polite, but also very easy to misunderstand. That’s just as a sidenote.

I was told his name is Bear. But he never reacted to that word. I mean he reacted to ‘lie down’ immediately. He learns words within seconds. But he doesn’t know his name? I told him that his name is Bunny, in the first hour of arriving here. An hour later he knew it, too. His name clearly is Bunny.

I was told this guy cannot play fetch with a ball. Which is like throwing a ball to a kid and when it doesn’t dribble and shoot concluding ‘this kid can’t play football’. I found out that he can all the components of fetch. He runs after the ball, he gets it, he brings it back, but sometimes he does these things in a different order. And he rarely does them more than twice. I guess that’s his choice.

Basically, I was told I get a plush teddy bear, and what I got was a real dog, with all dog features and some dog problems. Fortunately.

I was told that he doesn’t sleep in beds. Or that he doesn’t like beds. The reality is that he sleeps in a lot of different places, and that absolutely includes beds. It’s just that the location matters. A bed needs to be in a corner, and it needs to have a soft, comfortable surface. And even then it might be too warm. But beds, yeah, sure.

And I was told that they would like to stay in touch. They even offered to help dogsitting. None of that came to fruition of course, and with hindsight, it’s obvious why. The pauses between emails from them got longer and longer. The attempt to meet after one and a half year failed. And then the contact stopped altogether. His past is now gone forever.

Give yourself and your rehomed or rescued dog time to get to know each other. Don’t trust anything you have heard about the dog. Talk to the dog, work with the dog, live with the dog. The dog will tell you who he or she is.

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