Max

Max is back

Dec 12, 2008 : almost two years afer his adoption, Max has been returned to me. (His adopter was having difficulties due to inability or unwillingness to exercise leadership. This adoption is the one , out of more than a hundred over 20 years, that I deeply regret and where I really misjudged the match of adopter to dog.)

Max is now 4 years old. See his new photo in which he is very shaggy. (The photo in which he is shaved is from 2 years ago)

Max is a dog for an experienced owner who is very calmly alpha. He does well for such a person, but is NOT suited to a less experienced person or one unwilling to exercise leadership or unwilling to continue training and do body handling exercises on an ongoing basis.

Max would do best in a home with another dog who is a bitch, preferably a bitch who is fairly dominent with other dogs. He would also do well in a home where he is the only dog if he is not left home alone for long periods of time. He tends to be an anxous dog, tends to have some separation anxiety, and I will advise adopter on exercises to do with him to make him les anxious and to get him used to adopter leaving home and returning home. Owner should be willing to crate him when no one is home or have him in a room that has been "dog-proofed". I will provide a crate to the adopter. The crate is also advised for car travel because his former owner gave him reason to be anxous about car travel.

Max is up to date on shots, has been tested negative for heartworm and is on monthly prevention.

Update : Feb 3, 2009 :

Max has settled down a lot and responds well to matter of fact, no nonsense handling. He is very well behaved on leash, walking at heel, and he sits and downs well. Off leash he does NOT recall (come) reliably, and he needs a lot of long line work to improve his recall.

He reacts with fear to being restrained by strangers, as at the vet's with a neck and head hold. He accepts such handling from familiar people. An adopter would be wise to do regular body handling excercises. He accepts grooming well (he is totally ungroomed in the photo above, taken a day or so after his return). I will not put him into a home with young children as he would not react well to some of the rough grabbing and hugging that such children are apt to do.

He would do well in a home where he gets brisk exercise, eg jogging or running alongside a bicycle. He really needs at least half an hour of fast paced exercise a day plus several miles of ordinary walking.

I know it may sound like Max has a lot of negative qualities. Well, he does have some qualities that need intelligent management. But he also has a lot of good qualities. He is a very affectionate dog and is smart and willing to please. But he needs consistancy and clear direction.

Adopters please note : I do NOT do long distance adoptions. I am limiting Max's adoption to people willing to drive here to meet him, spend some time with him, and drive him to their home.

Update : Sept 27, 2009

Max did eventually get a home. It was a long and rocky road.

After some months in foster care, I was able to place him in what seemed like a great home with Allen who was spending the next several years working on a doctoral thesis in International Relations and living with his elderly mother so she would have his help. Thus Max would very rarely be home alone. Allen visited him twice here before taking him home, so I was able to make a careful introduction and Allen was able to gain Max's confidence and learn how to get him to obey basic commands. They were started on a great life together, with everyone in the family fond of Max and many in the neighborhood also admiring him. He got lots of walks daily and lots of time with his people. Just the life he needed.

Unfortunately Max was discovered to have a perianal tumor. These are usually benign, but occasionally they are malignant. They usually occur in unaltered male dogs and seem to be fueled by testosterone, so for an long neutered male like Max to have one is unusually bad luck. Worse luck because he was not yet covered by pet insurance and Allen as a student really could not afford the surgery needed, and of course even after a successful surgery Max would be much more costly to insure than otherwise. (The pet insurance companies seem to be catching on to some of the same tricks the human health insurance companies have been using for a long time now.) I offered to get the surgery done at my own vets, where it would be less costly, and to share the cost equally. But no go : Max came back again.

My vet did the surgery and the pathology lab results came back as a totally benign adenoma tumor completely excised with clean margins. Meaning a complete cure. I did have to pay her staff "combat" pay in the form of a certificate for a pound of See's chocolates, due to my guilty feelings because Max was so very difficult to handle. He'd also been extremely difficult to handle by Allen's vet, an old friend of mine who is a long time Bouvier person. So at this point, I had Max back as a healthy dog , but had to warn adopters that he would struggle and try to bite at the vets. Ah well, that's not as rare as it should be, and most vets can cope if they have fair warning and the dog comes in muzzled and pre-medicated.

I soon had another adopter lined up, a woman who worked away from home but who had a nice older Bouvier bitch who should be good company for Max and (we hoped) would be an antidote to his separation anxiety. Indeed she was so eager to meet Max that she insisted on coming for a visit the weekend after his surgery, even though she knew he couldn't go home with her that day (I wanted him here until his incision was fully healed, ie another week or so). Unfortunately I failed to take as careful an introductory approach with this adopter as I had with Allen. This adopter wanted to start by going for a walk with both dogs. After a while she took off her bitch's leash and I handed Max's leash over to her. We were fine until she started moving ahead of me (she walked faster than I do ; most people do so) and once we were separated by a dozen feet Max began struggling to get back to me. When pulling did not work, he started lunging and snapping at her. The cone collar ("elizabethan collar", device to prevent dog from licking or chewing at a surgical site) pretty much interfered with him being able to make contact. I said it would be better to hand him back to me, go back to the house and either muzzle him or spend time at home with her doing the same kind of intro stuff that had worked so well with Allen. I should have insisted. I was slow to realize that I was seeing the same kind of fear motivated aggression he had showed at the vets, motivated by fear of separation or perhaps fear that he was being led off to an ordeal as had happened at the vets. The adopter was quite confident that Max would settle down and accept her leadership. However on about the dozenth attempt he managed to land teeth on her arm. Blood flowed. A bite, not a serious bite, but enough to end the dog work --- and enough to end the adopter's interest in adopting Max of course.. I threw Max back into the kennel and then did the needed first aid on her arm. She was a very good sport about the whole thing. No anger at me or Max. I think most likely she considered herself responsible for her own decision to continue the walk despite Max's behavior and my advice to hand him back. In any case I am extremely grateful to her for her generous behavior towards me. (And I redoubled my efforts to find her a really wonderful dog. She has since adopted one that I referred her to. Doubly welcome since her bitch had died very unexpectedly in the meanwhile.)

I would have put Max down the following day were it not for the legal requirement of a 10 day quarrantine. I then planned to put him down immediately after the end of quarrantine. All my experienced rescue friends were very supportive of this plan, though I got some vehement objections from a rescue novice who believed that once a dog is rescued that should mean a guarrantee of lifetime home no matter what. I feel however that if a dog is substantially more dangerous than the normal dog of his breed and thus cannot be placed in any but really expert hands, then my only ethical choices are to either keep the dog myself (if I am sure I can do so safely for myself, for the dog, and for others) or to euthanize the dog. Since Max didn't get along reliably enough with my own dogs, that pretty much eliminated keeping him. Keeping him as a kennel dog, bored and lonely with only a daily walk as anything of interest and enjoyment, did not seem to me a long term acceptable lifestyle for him. On the other hand, I felt more responsible for him than usual because I felt that my mistake in his first placement had done a lot of damage to him and that if I'd made a better placement the first time he would have made a good adjustment and not gotten into all this trouble. I felt I owed him something extra but wasn't sure just how much.

During quarrantine, and with some battle raging over Max's future, I thought of the one and only adopter who just might have the animal skills and training savvy to deal with Max. Diana runs an animal farm with a range of domestic, semi-domestic, and wild species, literally running from Alpaca to Zebra. She's used to dealing with animals who can be very dangerous if mishandled in the slightest or if you aren't paying attention. She loves her animals but she says she is always thinking "what can go wrong and what must I do to prevent it". She'd had a previous adopted Bouvier who she loved dearly, had overcome a serious problem with, and who had passed away a while ago. She comes up to my area from time to time to present Petting Zoo events at various places. Offered a chance at Max, she was very interested. So she worked Max into her next trip, which happened to be not long after the end of his quarrantine. That first visit was less than a spectacular success, and with most adopters would have ended their interest. He was very wary of her and her husband at first, but offers of food treats helped and my dissappearing from the scene helped even more. So they made some progress on that visit. A few days later Diana phoned to say she really wanted to make a commitment to Max. She was due to come to my area (well 50 miles away) the next weekend and would try to make a second visit. That turned out not to work out because her husband had a medical problem flare up. But she still wanted Max, no question about it. She wisely wanted to get some livestock fence upgrades long planned actually accomplished before Max moved in, especially the alpaca paddock fence, and she wanted to have a good safe comfortable kennel run for him for those times when she might be away and didn't want to have her ranch manager have to deal with him. All the planning was on a "what can go wrong and how can I prepare to prevent it" basis. I had told her quite vividly everything undesirable about Max. Finally everything was in readyness and she and husband were doing a Zoo at the Lodi Grape Festival. So on opening day, when the events don't start till late afternoon, I took Max to spend part of the morning with her and we worked some more on getting him to trust and rely on her. A few days later at the end of the Festival, she picked Max up and took him home. So far all is well with them, though I admit I will be holding my breath for the next year.

Here is the photo I took just before they left :

• information and photo from Max's previous fostering with me, age 2 years