One year ago today, this tiny broken thing came into our lives. He is a trauma survivor and he will probably be working on social skills until the day he dies, but he’s already made incredible progress.
When Hanzo died of cancer, even though we weren’t ready to love another dog, Briar needed one. She wouldn’t even ask for a walk anymore--she just lay on the couch and slept all the time. So i hunted for the worst dog i could find. I reasoned that if it needed time to learn to trust us, then we’d also get time to grieve before learning to love it back. And it would feel good to give Hanzo’s place to a dog who desperately needed it.
I looked in shelters, but they were mostly just untrained or hesitant--even the “unadoptable” dogs were just unpleasant, and i wanted someone as heartbroken as we were. Eventually, i saw this blurry photo of a chihuahua mix on Petfinder and had a good feeling. When S.P.O.T. called me, they were clear: he was almost feral when he was dropped off at the shelter, and even after almost two years being fostered with a loving volunteer, the first people who tried to adopt him returned him in six hours. He wasn’t going to let me even touch him before he came to live with me, and maybe not for months later.
It worked out better than i ever could have imagined. That first week, he bit me and/or shit on me every time i put his harness on him, but it wasn’t long (maybe six months?) before he began to leap and spin with joy at the prospect of a walk. He takes treats from my friends, and if they’re quiet and gentle, he’ll allow them to pet him. He still doesn’t want to sit in laps or be picked up, but he snuggles up against me at night, and wakes me in the morning by doing little somersaults against my face like a doofy cat.
I’ve helped a lot of unwanted dogs in my life--that’s a story for another time, but it mostly involves my mom discovering that 1) the county we lived in didn’t have a humane society and 2) our house was pretty big--but this is the first time that i actually feel like i’ve rescued the dog and not just adopted it.
Welcome home, Watson, and happy anniversary.
