Danny, Our First Border Collie

Happy Settles In

Recently I told the story of Happy's rescue from a life of homelessness in northern Florida and of his move to our house.  His first stop on that road was at our vet's office for neutering.  None of our dogs or cats has ever been in our house without being sterilized.  I first saw him as he was leaving the office after the neutering.  He was being carried out because he wouldn't walk on a leash—so great was his terror of humans.  I was just beginning to understand how much adjustment he faced and how much we faced as well.

We knew he was shy of human contact.  You couldn't pet him, and if you even made a move to touch him, he would dodge away from your hand.  I thought perhaps he had never been touched by a person.  Off the leash in the house, he found two best friends, our other dogs, Peachy and Princess.  They hit it off right away.  Our six cats were another matter, however.  Possibly Happy had never been with a cat before.  Most of our felines stood their ground, and when curious Happy approached, they advanced, hissing and growling.  Happy knew enough to avoid the batting front cat feet, and the cats never laid a glove on him.  But we worried it could happen with possible injuries.  We took to discouraging cat interactions which devolved into yelling for Happy to break off and come (not quite within arm's reach as he still didn't want our petting).

House training also presented an ongoing problem.  He would go a couple of days without an accident, and then regress.  I sensed it would be a long learning process, so we had all the rugs removed from the house and cleaned.  Now we pad around in our stocking feet on ceramic tile floors, which clean up easily.  He's not reliable yet, but we're training ourselves to get him into the dog's fenced back yard on his schedule.  Admittedly, we are wildly optimistic and hopeful we'll eventually prevail—but it won't happen tomorrow.

Border Collies are herding dogs insistent that their charges stay in a tight group, even if that means nipping at their legs to prod them.  Happy does this—not with sheep, but with the humans in the house.  His nips can hurt, and he has been known to break the skin.  We'll have to learn to calm him.

Now we are five weeks into our new association with Happy, and if the next five weeks are as tough as the last ones, we'll both need to move into an asylum.  We talked it over and decided Happy needs to have some formal training.  As much as we like dogs and as many as we've had, we've never had such a disruptive entity in our home.  We have taken in many animals over the years we've been together, and some previously had lived only in the outdoors, yet we never had so much trouble with comportment, housetraining, destruction of shoes, books, pillows etc.  We both knew we'd met our match and something needed to change.  In spite of our desperate home situation, we loved Happy as much as any of the others we've had.

Our wonderful vet, Marty Neher had the answer for us—a professional dog trainer, Don Murray, who came to our house, met Happy, and told us of his methods.  An hour and a half later we signed up for Happy's two week stay in Don's house for a course of rigorous training.  During his interview with us, Don had calmed Happy down, answered our questions, and calmed our fears.

Yesterday we said goodbye to Happy as he left for his stint living in Dan's house with their other dogs and cats.  Charlene and I were apprehensive and unhappy at being separated for such a long time.

It's amazing to me that after 5 weeks of elimination atrocities in our house, dog proofing to protect our possessions, yelling at him to leave the cats alone, having him not come when called, trying to imagine if he needs to go out in the back yard (guess wrong and you get to clean it up) that we don't hate Happy, but it's quite the opposite.  Right now, in spite of the turmoil he's caused us, we dread the 2 weeks we must be without him.  He only left yesterday, but we're already counting the days until his return.

Almost no one can define "love," but our attachment to Happy after weeks of unexpected problems and stress serves as good an operative definition as I can come up with.

Les Inglis