Canine Chaos

I drove up to Anne's in Portland yesterday afternoon for dinner (reluctantly dragging myself away from a palate fistula repair in an elderly dachshund's mouth at the clinic). I took my three dogs. Anne has three dogs. A friend from Utah was visiting her who had three dogs. Another friend from Portland joined us with one of her dogs. Lost count?

The role call:

• Azza, 2 yr old desert dog
• Mimi and Harry, 8 yr old and 15 yr old smooth fox terriers
• Forrest, 10 yr old parson russell terrier
• Skeeter, 4 yr old parson russell terrier (since she is matter and Mimi is anti-matter, their meeting would annihilate the universe so Skeeter isn't in the video below)
• Rumble, 1.5 yr old aussi
• Bender and Tolt, 6 mo old B&W BC pups
• their dad, 10-ish yr old, and older brother, unknown age, also B&W BCs

Another way of looking at this chaos: four border collies, three terriers (four counting Skeeter), an aussie, and the desert dog. It was a seething mass of dogs.

It was a little bit rough with Azza at first because she was overwhelmed by all those dogs. Lots of cringing, whining vocalizations, teeth baring and snapping, and generally not very nice behavior on her part. She's also not had the best experiences with black dogs so that might have played into her fear. Thankfully, the BCs and the Aussie were all well adjusted and simply turned away from her instead of engaging or escalating.

We ended up dumping Azza and Skeeter, who get along very well, in a side yard. That turned out to be a Very Good Idea as those sorts of random decisions can be. While watching everything for 20 minutes or so, Azza was able to calm down and work out that none of those dogs had any interest in harming her and might in fact have some play potential.

After behaving badly in the intro, it took Azza quite some time to convince the other dogs to play with her. They'd look at her and think "you crazy, bitch" and walk away. She kept trying though, and she can be pretty persuasive. She avoided the older dogs and eventually had great success with the younger ones.

I can only say this about the video, which I unfortunately shot late in the evening: Harry seems to at last be doing great on the Adequan (he's the only one who's barking, too), and that's a lot of dogs!