Now We Needed A Dog

The following is part 1 of a story I wrote a few years ago, it's not even really done yet but it will be soon. Hope you like it!

We first met Dana in the spring of 2004. She was a huge German Shepard that was a total Alpha Female. She also seemed unimpressed that we were there to see if we wanted to adopt her. She didn’t look like your typical female Shepard, she was very broad like a male and had these huge paws.

Let’s go back a little first. My wife and I had a German Shepard when we got married. Actually, she was my wife’s dog when I met her and was a trained police attack dog, but it didn’t take long before she was very much my dog too.

I always loved dogs growing up, especially big dogs, but my parents always told us our house was not one for a dog. I couldn't really figure out exactly what that meant since all the houses on the block were the same model, and plenty of our neighbors had dogs. I know they knew they’d end up caring for it, and I don’t think they wanted the mess or added expense. I understood, and used the other neighborhood dogs as surrogates.

Our first German Shepard passed away a day after her eleventh birthday. Not bad for a dog that had a birth defect in hear heart that wasn’t discovered for 9 years. She ended up keeling over in our back yard garden and dying on her own. She took the hard decision of euthanizing out of our hands. We had just found out that my wife was pregnant with our first son, kind of ironic that she passed at that time but she had been ill and she went on her own terms. Of course we were devastated. She was for all intents and purposes our child, not just a pet. I told my wife right there that there wouldn’t be another dog. I didn’t think I could go through that again!

We moved out of our first house not too long after our youngest Seth was born. It was a Cape Cod style home and we just needed more living space. We found a home in a decent neighborhood about three miles away and moved in November of 2000.

It was now a few years since our dear Gretchen (no, we didn’t name her) departed this earth, my wife started to bring up the dog subject again. I was really kind of against it. As much as I loved dogs, the pain we felt after losing Gretchen was horrible. The thought of going through that again just wasn’t very appealing. My wife made the argument that every little boy should grow up with a dog in the house. After not having a dog when I was a child, how could I argue with that logic? I think deep down I really did want another dog, but I had my reservations. In any case, I relented just as any good husband would, and we started a search for our new family pet.

We didn’t really want a puppy and we both agreed that we wanted another Shepard because they were so loyal and from what we’d experienced, great with kids when properly treated and trained. She started to look at rescue sites and we came up with a few options.

She found a Shepard named Sadie. Sadie was about a year old and house broken. Her owner took us out in the yard and showed us how he played with her by throwing one of her toys and having her retrieve it. Seth, who was around 4 at the time, thought it would be fun to run with Sadie when she went chasing her toy. Well, this resulted in Sadie literally tackling him not once, but three times! It was actually pretty funny! He ran, she tackled, he got back up and started to run, she tackled. The third time I just yelled for him to stay down so I could go over and get him without her knocking him over again. Needless to say, we figured that Sadie was not the right pet for us.

We belonged to a network of homeshooling families as this was something we made a decision to do after an experience with our local public school system. This one homeschooling family lived on a farm in Perkiomenville, PA. They had quite a few animals including horses and this big two and a half year old female German Shepard named Dana. She had the run of this 13 acre farm for a good part of the day. She had a small man-made pond for those hot summer days, and also spent some time in the house with the family. They seemed to feel that when Dana was in the house, she was a distraction when the kids were trying to school. In addition, she must have annoyed one of the horses and ended up getting kicked in the head. She was ok, and it didn’t deter her from going into the barn and licking the horses face! However, the family felt that Dana didn’t necessarily fit their lifestyle.

As I said in the very beginning, she seemed unimpressed that we were even there, but she didn’t bark or growl at us, she was by no means a “mean” dog, and we saw this spark in her, she seemed very sweet.

We left the farm without Dana that day as we wanted to discuss what we had seen and heard there, and see if we had other options. Our decision? She seemed like a great family pet. Of course we had some reservations but our other options didn’t really pan out, so we decided to go back and make her ours.

When we arrived in Perkiomenville that morning, Dana was a little muddy from being in her pond so they wanted to give her a bath. Her farm mom got the hose and started spraying her down. This was a game to Dana as she started to try and bite the stream of water coming out of the hose. . .it was pretty entertaining. She finally got rinsed off and dried and we put her crate in our van. They gave us some of her favorite toys, which included an old plastic bottle (which I just found after cleaning up our yard), and Dana jumped right into our van and was ready for the trek to her new home.

During the ride, I took an on ramp a little too fast and Dana’s crate ended up tilted towards the right side of the van. I stopped on the side of the road so I could fix it and she looked like she needed to go to the bathroom. Don’t ask me how I knew this, it was just this look she had. So I got her on the leash and went towards the bushes on the side of this road. One thing I found out very fast was that she was really strong! She pulled me around wherever SHE wanted to go. She did do her business and then jumped back into the van.

About an hour and a half later, we were home. In the front of our house is this triangular little island with a tree in the middle and small bushes around the edges. At the front of this triangle was a big concrete deer and her little foe. Well, Dana didn’t know they were concrete. When I let her out of the van and she saw them she went absolutely ballistic!! Started barking hear head off and pulling me all over the place. If my neighbors saw what was going on, I’m sure it was comical to watch this eighty five pound dog make this two hundred twenty pound grown man look like a puppet on the end of the leash. I wasn’t walking her, she was taking me for a ride!

I finally got her in the house and she checked out her new digs. My older son Josh, now 6 years old, was a little afraid of her. She was just as big as he was and weighed more. Whenever she got up, he would grab my hand and walk with me, even when we took her out back to see her new yard he seemed nervous. I was concerned that we’d made a mistake. However, this only lasted a couple of days and he realized she was pretty harmless. Their bond started at that point. I knew we were ok when I came home from work one day and saw Dana laying down with her body in kind of a semi-circle, and Josh laying on her belly like she was a pillow while he watched TV. At that point, he became her puppy.

Seth and Dana didn’t seem to bond as well right away. It could be because he liked to tease her. She was not a biter, but she did nip him in the chest once. . .after he thought it was a good idea to stick his finger in the end of her hiney!! Well, I would have nipped him too!

One day we were playing with Dana out back, throwing the ball and watching her chase it. She was very serious about chasing her ball and focused only on chasing and retrieving when it was thrown. Well, for some reason, one time when I threw the ball, Seth decided to run too and ended up right out in her path. Remember, he was four years old, probably all of 40 or 50 pounds (we were all a little chubby), and this 85 pound four legged animal was running full force! She totally ran him over, didn’t even blink when she did it. At some point while she bulldozed him, one of her claws caught the middle of his nostril, sliced it all the way through! He got up and I saw him bleeding. Ran him in the house and got ice on it. A six hour visit to the ER and seven stitches later, we were back home. I couldn’t blame the dog, it was just bad timing on her part, he ran right in front of her and her focus was on the ball. He’ll always have something to remember her by, unfortunately its a scar but it was better than almost losing a nostril!

I think she actually felt bad, they seemed to make amends after that, Although he did continue to annoy her, it wasn't so bad and they bonded as well.