"He's a scary dog"

Bear came from the old shelter. He was a cute puppy who untied my shoelaces and charmed us into forgetting that what we were really looking for was a female. He spent the first few months pretty much alone with us. We had a quiet Christmas--we were still in mourning for my mother and for our last dog. So we didn't do much socializing.

And Bear didn't get much socialization. That was probably the first problem.

He played pretty rough sometimes. We didn't stop him, as we should have (we know that now).

We went on vacation and boarded him at an unfamiliar kennel. We don't know what happened at that kennel. We think possibly a number of dogs might have been let out for exercise all at once and may have fought. It is possible that the humans might have started being afraid of our Bear. Whatever happened, when we went to pick him up, he came out of the cage in attack mode. I was too surprised to be afraid, and probably my lack of fear was what calmed the Bear by the time he reached me.

Bear was becoming a scary dog. He had been neutered, but had an undescended testicle that his veterinarian couldn't find, despite surgery. That veterinarian started to be afraid of him--we started putting a muzzle on him to go to the vet. And that was about the only place he went. We didn't dare take him around anyone else.

We really couldn't deal with him. We didn't want a vicious dog, and he was becoming a vicious dog. We considered the possibilities. If anyone else wanted him, it would not be for anything good. If we returned him to the shelter, nothing good was going to happen to him. There seemed to be only two choices:

Take the responsibility of having him euthanized ourselves, or
Make him into a good dog

We can't really put our finger on what we did to make him into a good dog. Getting him out in contact with other people was a big part of it. We took him walking and let him see that no one was going to hurt him. One neighbor of ours reached out and petted him before we could warn her that he might be aggressive. He was startled, but then seemed to realize that this was something nice! We told our neighbor later that we credited her with Bear's big breakthough.

"Gentle dog. Be a gentle dog" became the most important thing we wanted the Bear to learn. We tried to be gentle around him. It didn't seem logical to use violence to try to teach him to be non-violent. So we didn't punish him for aggressive behavior, but rather tried to quiet him down with soft talk and assurances.

Meantime, his veterinarian left town and Bear started going to a new vet. We asked his new doctor to try to find that undescended testicle. Turns out that in the last year, it had descended. Now Bear was completely neutered. That may have helped.

His new veterinarian also advised us to leave Bear alone with him for examination and treatment, because sometimes dogs behave badly with a veterinarian in an attempt to protect their humans. He always maintained that Bear behaved beautifully when we weren't around.

We must have done something right. Bear became a pretty good dog. He wasn't a perfect dog--we always tried to warn people that his behavior could be unpredictable. But on the whole, it was pretty good. A man reached into our car one day to pet Bear--and got away with it! (Reaching into a car with a dog in it is never a good idea. The sweetest dog can be very protective of his/her car.) Another time we weren't fast enough to stop a little girl from grabbing the Bear's ear with both hands to turn it and examine it--but Bear didn't object. We usually tried to stay on our guard when we were around other people, though, because we'd seen Bear snap and growl for no reason that we could detect.

Bear eventually became very mellow. At one point on a walk he was surrounded by kids who were petting him (very gently because I told them that Bear was a very, very old dog), and I never for a moment worried that he would try to bite any of those kids. That old dog died two days later, May 27, 2001.

--Nan Lawler

Return to the Fayetteville Animal Shelter and Animal Services homepage.