I so wanted this to be a redemption story.
Sixteen months ago, we “accidentally” adopted a new dog, Diamond. As you can see in the original thread, Diamond was a problematic fit in our family from the beginning, instantly showing reactivity/aggression toward our resident “special needs” dog:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=18105838#post18105838
Over the ensuing 16 months, I have many times begun to write out her story. But what story? Our assessment of Diamond has constantly fluctuated as visible progress alternated with serious setbacks. It’s an agonizingly long story, involving numerous behaviorists and trainers and three behavioral medications and lots of opinion from dog folks.
The greatly shortened nutshell version:
Diamond has grown into a medium-large mixed-breed dog of 50 pounds, give or take a few. She’s physically impressive: beautiful brindle color, clean lines, slim and muscular, perfect gleaming white teeth. She sprints fast as hell when she gets a chance, and can turn it up beyond that when motivated. She notices and remembers everything. She is agile and poised, strong and sleek, able to pounce like a cat and strike like a snake, almost too fast for me to follow. Her determination and focus are formidable.
All the above are admirable qualities in a dog, provided said dog is emotionally stable, well-socialized, and has good judgment. They are all detriments if said dog is coming at you or another dog or cat with ill intent.
Diamond has been able to moderate her reactivity toward our other dog Simone, but only enough to tolerate Simone’s presence nearby while Diamond is securely crated – and even then she sometimes focuses her attention on Simone in ways that make us glad she’s in a steel cage. Fortunately Diamond is easily crated and tolerates being in the crate for long periods so that Simone doesn’t have to be banished to the back room all the time.
Diamond continues to want to kill the resident cat. Only carefully-maintained physical barriers have kept the cat alive to date. Her prey drive is near-absolute: she lunges at cats, birds, squirrels, flying insects, and is hell to all crickets.
Diamond has made minor progress, especially very recently, in her aggression toward other dogs. Just in the last few weeks she’s suddenly (for no reason I can determine) allowed me to turn her away from another dog and, as long as I rapidly move her away, she will restrain herself to barking a few times and then being on high alert. Of course, if allowed to stare at another dog uninterrupted, she will escalate into fury. She will begin a display of huffing and snarling and lunging and even thrashing to try and throw off her harness. But overall, the ability to turn her away from other dogs at all before she goes “over threshold” represents some form of progress.
Diamond has made great progress ingratiating herself with my wife and me. She can be very sweet and cuddly when she wants. She can be silly and has a sense of humor. She’s very playful…although that play easily spirals up into “way too rough.” Sometimes she doesn’t respond to verbal and nonverbal cues that she’s playing too rough, and escalates until I walk to the other side of the steel gate. She follows, striking at my back and legs. She has learned many commands well, because she’s smart when she wants to pay attention, but follows them only when she is not overstimulated or focused on someone she wants to bite/roughhouse with/kill.
But even with us, she easily gets overexcited and goes “over threshold,” jumping and shoving and nipping and play-biting way too hard.
So to sum up the problems, in more-or-less increasing order of trouble:
• Consistently Rough play
• Goes over threshold emotionally
• Dog Aggression
• Unpredictable around strange humans
• And most troublingly, Diamond remains a core of distrust in us.
When she’s unsure, she’s willing to growl at us (we know a growl is a warning sign we don’t want to discourage, but Diamond’s judgment is so poor she growls when she’s mistaken about what’s going on). If I take something she can’t have out of her mouth, she often sneaks in a late “punishment bite,” bearing down hard on my hand once she’s lost her prize. She doesn’t hesitate to bite and/or strike us when she awakens confused, or is momentarily in pain, or is over threshold because of another dog.
That’s the worst part. A dog who uses violence against her own family members is beyond alarming. Notable incidents:
• She woke up one night barking furiously in terror. I also woke up, leaned in to comfort her, and she struck like a viper, opening a wound on my eyebrow just above the eyelid that bled (as scalp wounds do) alarmingly.
• She generally likes being petted when she’s on the couch with me, unless she deems I am sliding a hand under her like I might be about to force her off the couch – then she growls and will even snap her teeth in warning.
• Numerous times, when being harnessed up for a walk, she’s leaped up and muzzle-punched me in the face, then crouched in apparent fear…only to be fine and easily-harnessed moments later. I now never put a collar, harness or muzzle on her without cramming treats in her face, which works pretty well. Before I made a religious habit of that, she bent my glasses many times.
• When I once picked her up to control her while an off-leash puppy ran circles around us, Diamond battered the side of my head with her own head, trying to wriggle free to kill the puppy. My ear swelled up and bled.
• When growling a warning didn’t dissuade us from trying to trim her long, raking front claws, she deliberately clobbered me in the head, stunning me. This was despite treat distraction. Fortunately we’d put the muzzle on her and I’d taken off my vulnerable glasses. She was perfectly composed a moment later – this wasn’t a flinch, this was a pre-emptive strike to make her position clear.
And it’s more than just us who have been the focus of her fear. Once, a local idiot let his off-leash dog run up to Diamond while my wife was walking her. (This despite previous warnings and having had a scary previous encounter with Diamond). He ignored my wife’s screams of warning. No one will make him do something he doesn’t want to do, by God!
Predictably, Diamond bit down hard on the muzzle of the perfectly friendly Golden Retriever puppy. A neighbor intervened, trying to yank Diamond off the dog by the oft-recommended technique of hauling her back legs off the ground. Diamond immediately gave the neighbor a swift warning bite.
Surprisingly, the bite incident didn’t turn out as badly for Diamond as it might have. For one thing, it was a simple puncture, not a "mauling,"and she let go quickly. I think she had the undeserved good luck to bite a dog lover, who declined to follow up. Diamond was subject to “home quarantine” for rabies, but otherwise Animal Control didn’t do anything except file a report. The wounded neighbor’s boyfriend was mad at us, but they did not pursue us legally or otherwise. There’s a minor element of hypocrisy in his anger, since his dog (who not the one Diamond attacked) had previously attacked and bitten another dog. Other neighbors sided with us, or expressed support; and some even make a point of petting Diamond when they see her on walks.
So far Diamond is generally happy to meet humans as long as they give her dog-readable cues that they mean no harm. Expressive people who make a fuss over her are greeted with excited wags. People who glare at her, are afraid of the muzzle, whose faces are hidden, or who are simply expressionless can make her growl or bark.
Of course, she looks like Hannibal Lecter when they pet her, because she wears a muzzle outside now, and two leashes, one attached to a harness we check and tighten regularly, the other to a “martingale collar,” a kind of choke collar with a stop ring to prevent it from closing too tightly. Prior to our going to the two-restraint system, Diamond escaped from collar and harness a few times, twice prompting me to dive onto her like a football player on a fumble. She’s snapped an (admittedly worn) nylon webbing leash in half simply by surging forward violently.
I have been all over the map on Diamond and her fate. Sometimes I really love her and want to protect her from the world; sometimes I am physically afraid of her. My wife is much more afraid of her. Only I walk her. I am always conscious of the threat she presents to our other family members and to neighborhood dogs and cats.
I don’t demand fawning subservience from a dog, but there has to be some level of trust, preferably love. I’m not afraid of strong, physically capable dogs. We’ve had pit bulls before; other dog Simone is in fact a pit bull, and she’s a total doll. Diamond however is an unknown mix, but I am of the opinion that mix includes Plott hound, a relatively uncommon North Carolina bear-hunting breed. “Breed tendencies” are of course to be taken with a grain of salt – there’s a lot of mythologizing going on, and dogs are of course individuals. I don’t blame the breed…but the Slate article on Plott hounds is unsettling, to say the least:
The neighborhood is full of dogs, often off-leash despite the condo covenants, and roaming cats.
Logically, it makes little sense to struggle to convert this damaged waif when there are so many solid, stable, healthy dogs being put down. For example, we are partial to pit bulls. The Petfinder website alone says there are twenty thousand pit bulls needing homes in my zip code, and it’s not the only resource.
My wife has put up with a lot, and loves Diamond herself, but the constant worry and the steel gates and the displacement and the fear and the blood-soaked towels have taken their toll. Over the long year-plus struggle I have been the principal holdout – Diamond’s last hope and only advocate during some periods. And the crushing blow to the head Diamond dealt me a few weeks ago was the final straw. I was sore for three days; my wife is grimly determined, although it’s breaking both our hearts. Diamond must go.
And there’s nowhere to go.
No one else can adopt her without facing the same intractable issues. There’s no “farm in upstate New York.” Any expert who could rehabilitate her would do more good spending that time on some dog with fewer problems.
We’ve made and broken two appointments to have her put down – one my wife made for Christmas eve, which I talked her out of, and the second in April. Diamond was saved that second time by the fact that my mother died the day of the appointment, one month ago today, and my wife immediately canceled.
But my wife is intractable. And she’s right. Ethically, legally…we know we were lucky in the bite incident’s lack of legal consequences. And we feel terrible about the pretty little dog who got bitten (she seems to have recovered, I’m happy to report). We took Diamond in in the first place to protect a dog from getting hurt. And she’s still a threat to all dogs and cats.
Perhaps doing this is even in Diamond’s best interest. Diamond flinches when startled and is always on alert when walked outside; she nurses on her blanket when she’s indoors at night. Her life probably has a lot of stress. We’ve all suffered quality-of-life degradation these past 16 months. Because she’s been unbearably uncivilized some evenings, Diamond is crated more than she used to be; Simone fusses and barks in frustration when confined to the other room, even when I am with her; the cat slinks about warily when we let him out of the back room; and I am typing this with two fresh puncture wounds on one hand.
But this apparently necessary decision is killing me. I’m the one who drove 15 hours one way to retrieve her. I’m the one who walks her early in the morning and late at night. She’s been my sleeping buddy during my Mom’s illness and death. (Simone, who is totally “my” dog, and whom I love without reservation, sleeps in the other room with my wife for safety.)
In the last few months and weeks, I’ve desperately thrashed things around in my head. Maybe a rescue would take her! Maybe a white knight would step in and save her, if only I could write something persuasive enough! Anything to get myself off the hook. But I’ve realized that “making myself feel better” is a pretty lame guiding principle.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who puts a dog to death for being dangerous. It smacks of putting a dog to death for being too much trouble. For being inconvenient. And yet here we are.
My wife made the appointment, the third and presumably last, for when Diamond’s current prescription of psych meds runs out. A practical decision. But the heart is not practical.
This morning Diamond sat quietly after her walk, head bent gracefully, waiting for me to come touch her before crating her and leaving for work. This beautiful, passionate, dangerous creature leaned into my embrace with great gentleness and sighed.
There are two pills left.