Pits on Parade

I've really been enjoying my volunteer time at the animal shelter and have gone there three times in less than a week. In fact, I hope Cabana's blog doesn't get too overrun by photos from my visits there. So I will post these and then, it will be back to the regularly scheduled labby programming!!


On Saturday, six volunteers (all happened to be women) took six pitbulls for a pack walk. I don't know if you can really call it a pack walk, because we had to walk them all kind of far apart to keep them from getting overly excited. Most of the dogs are actually very friendly with other dogs, but there's no fenced area (a huge deficit for the shelter) to let them off leash. (Only five are pictured because I'm out in front, taking the photo.)

I was walking Paco, whose big ol' head you can see in the foreground of this photo. In front of Paco is a sweet dog who recently had a litter of puppies. The people kept the puppies, presumably to sell, and dumped the mama. Nice.

Today, I spent a couple hours with this adorable white pitbull, Francie. When I first walked into her kennel, she grabbed the leash I was holding in her mouth and tried to play tug with me. So I dropped the leash to let her know I didn't want to engage her in that game. She then dropped her end of the leash and starting jumping wildly all over me instead.

I thought, hmmm, do I really want to pick this dog to take for a walk? But I ended up falling in love with her. After getting her out of the noisy kennels (where all the dogs are barking like crazy), she calmed down and was the sweetest thing ever.

We walked for about 30 minutes, and whenever Francie would pull, I'd just stop walking. She'd circle back to stand closer to me, and then she'd walk with a beautifully loose j-shaped leash! That's certainly not something I can take credit for--someone else had obviously worked with her a lot (Francie was a stray). But one thing I noticed is that she kept veering into my walking lane. I was walking her on my left side because that's how I always walk Cabana. Finally, duh, I tried walking her on my right side, and voila--no more veering! I guess Francie had been taught to walk on the right! It's amazing how you can tell what a dog knows and doesn't know. Hopefully, next time, I'll be a bit quicker on picking up those subtle (and not so subtle) cues.

Update: Kelti, the yellow lab from my previous post, was adopted on Saturday. Hooray!

Our Own Dogtown

After watching every episode of every season of the show Dogtown on Netflix, I have been itching to help shelter dogs get adopted. Martha has been inspirational to me with her stories of volunteering at her local humane society. This past week, my husband came across a plea online for volunteer dog trainers at our local animal shelter, so I gladly signed up. Today was my first session with the shelter training director, who strongly believes that every dog in the shelter should have the opportunity to get basic obedience training (sit, down, wait, stay, leash walking). It will help them be more adoptable and help them transition more successfully to their new homes. She proudly told me that this shelter's annual euthanasia rate is 1.3%, which I thought was awesome.

The story of this chocolate lab was in our local papers, brought into the shelter because he had been found roaming the streets in a severely emaciated state. He weighed less than 40 pounds, about half what he should weigh, and his hind-end fur had been lost to urine burns.

Here's what he looks like today, on a walk with a volunteer. He has gained over 20 pounds and is doing great. The former owner was arrested and faces a felony dog cruelty charge.

Kelti is a sweet 3-year old yellow lab who has lived her whole life in a backyard without attention or direction.

I got to walk Kelti for a little while today, but she was just all over the place on the leash. She doesn't respond to her name (which, granted, may not have been her name for very long), so we're starting at ground zero. It's sad to think that no one took the time to teach her something as basic as "sit" for the past three years.

Like all shelters, our shelter is inundated with pit bulls. It seemed like almost half the dogs there were pits. This one is extremely sweet and totally adoptable to someone who can handle a high energy dog.


I'll get assigned to two dogs and spend 2-4 hours a week working with them. Hopefully, I'll get to see them progress and improve and go to great families and homes. Maybe they'll even get dog blogs of their own someday!