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Date Posted: 19:59:19 05/05/09 Tue
Author: Julie B
Subject: Akiva and the cold hard facts

When Akiva was four months old, Ed and Jessica came on the yellow board asking why she would shy away and try to hide behind their legs when people tried to pet her. She was not a happy, carefree, confident puppy. She was almost always stressed when out in public. She saw threat where there was none from a very early age and had a super low stress threshold. As nearly everyone who is reading this can understand, they really loved their puppy and wanted to do right by her. As it’s hard to tell that early on if the dog is a nerve bag or if they are just going to require a little more effort, they decided to do all they could to see her mature into a well-adjusted, happy, confident dog. Training, motivation, socialization and tolerance building where implemented.

As a puppy working in OB, her response to being handled by a trainer was to bite him in the calf. If the trainer tried to interact with her, she would panic and try like crazy to run away…not towards Jessica but to just bail and run in a panic.

At around 16 months she was tested for a civil response with some civil agitation. She responded with high-pitched barking and bit a tug. They then took Akiva to Bill Kulla for testing on a sleeve around 18 months. He told them her nerves were too weak for that type of work and they left it alone.

When Akiva was sent to me for training (at around 20 months old), she was placed in her crate at 6:00 am, loaded on the plane at 7:00 am and landed in Austin at 1:00 pm. It was NINE O’CLOCK PM before that dog would come out of the crate. I walked her for at least another hour before she would even relieve herself. She was very accustomed to leashed potty breaks, too. After several hundred dogs coming to me for private training over the years, she was certainly unique…no dog had ever taken anywhere near that long to acclimate enough to come out of the crate and I have had some seriously traumatized fosters come through. Given all the socialization, motivation and love this dog was exposed to, it was very apparent her nerve had a lot to be desired. She wasn’t being nasty to me and would even take treats from me and drink the water I offered her in the crate from the first hour she was here, but she was just plain scared to come out.

While she was here with me, Akiva blossomed in her work, developed some very sound control and focus under distraction. I teach, teach, teach before there is ever any compulsion applied and we got along very well. She worked her little hiney off for me. I did apply compulsion where it was needed towards the end of her time here….because…. at times, that’s the only way to address a certain behavior at a certain stage with any kind of reliable results. Anyone can watch her videos on my Youtube channel and see that she LOVED working for me and she trusted me completely. I poured my heart into making that dog the best she could be because of Jessica’s utter dedication to this dog. Our combined goal was to polish up her OB and to have her so reliable that she would be trustworthy during a BH.

However, there was always something popping up that pointed to weak nerve and a very low stress threshold.

When she was crated, she would immediately begin drooling. Copious amounts of drool just pouring out of her mouth and obsessively digging and biting at the crate in an attempt to escape. It looked like she had a bucket of water thrown on her and the entire floor of the crate would be sopping wet. She suffered a number of staff infections in her life from this weird nervous response. I always have personal fans on the dogs and she was directly under the AC vent, so it sure wasn’t due to her being hot. She had done this from a very early age with no traumatic experiences to set it off.

I took Akiva to a dog show to experience the environment and to proof her OB under distraction. After a couple hours of being a complete angel, she rushed out to try and bite a woman who was merely walking by. That woman was doing absolutely nothing different than the hundred or so other folks that had walked by that day. The only possible conclusion I could come to on that one was that she was desperate to assert herself to feel in control to some degree or the fact that the woman she chose to try and bite was quite petite and probably looked like an easy target.

One night while we were out walking, someone exited their car without her noticing and slammed the door several yards behind her. She panicked so badly that she tried to bail and run and she pulled one of my ribs out of place and I had a kink in my neck for several days.

The final week that Akiva was here, Jessica flew down and we worked her in every safe venue we could think of…the pet store, public parks, at the school yard during soccer practice and at the end of the week, we attended a night SchH trial to let them both see what it was all about. Akiva was so noise sensitive that she would jump up and start looking for someone to bite with each round fired from the starter pistol. It doesn’t take a genius to know that noise sensitivity of this caliber equates to a nerve issue.

Ed and I discussed what she could actually accomplish as far as titles and I told him I felt a BH and possibly some other Obedience activities were within her capability. I also recommended that they not even consider bite work unless we saw some miraculous new stability develop. After going home and having her meltdown at the SchH club, where they were practicing towards the BH, I told them to back burner it… that even the club environment was too much for her to handle.

She was over-the top dog aggressive with no traumatic experiences to cause it in the first place. If you could keep her focused and busy she would largely ignore other dogs, but she still had moments where it was almost as if she would mentally check out for a second and one had to really work to bring her mind back to reality and refocus her on the desired task at hand.

Though she could be controlled for the most part, her aggression was random, unpredictable and lightening quick with nasty intent. As she approached true adulthood, her temperament just deteriorated. Instead of getting more tolerant and better with more outings and rewarding experiences, she just got less capable of handling any kind of external stimuli. She bit three people in the months preceding her euthanasia and each one progressively worse in the damage she inflicted…each time being more random, more erratic, more just plain nutso.

We all hope our pups are going to turn out and become that elusive ideal Boerboel. Sometimes issues are outgrown or training provides enough of a sense of security or control to make them manageable and safe in public or at home.

When we see improvement, we are inspired and proud and hope this is the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m sure that’s the nature that Ed and Jessica shared Akiva’s minor victories and training videos in.

It’s a very, very well known fact that many Boerboel owners once thought their puppy was just wonderful even though there were signs here and there that the dog’s “wiring” might be a bit off. They watch it mature, try their best to improve and ultimately find that things aren’t just a little off…that the dog just plain has a screw loose and is more of liability than anything.

The only thing that Ed and Jessica or even I ever did “wrong” with this dog was to believe she could overcome her lack of nerve with the right experiences, training and very conscientious handling practices. It just wasn’t enough.

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