Beginnings...

This will be a very long post, to catch up on Jax so far...

On April 5, after months - no, years for me! - of expectation, longing, and recently much husband&wife bargaining, H and I adopted a 3 month old retriever mix from a local shelter. His name at the time, for which neither of us harbored great affection, was "Buster Brown." While we agreed that his name had to change, we also found that we lacked much common ground with regard to favorable names. I wanted to name him after an Old Testament prophet (Amos, Ezekiel, etc.). H wanted to name him "Honey-cheeks" or some such nonsense. With some help from our Minnesotan friends who accompanied us on the adoption trip, we settled on Jackson, or Jax for short, during the short car trip home.

Jax came house-trained, a plus. But he did not come crate-trained (much more on that later). We did not have high expectations of a rescue dog. In truth we were only really shopping for temperament. We wanted a pooch that was outgoing and social, friendly but not domineering, playful (for me) but willing to cuddle (for H). So far, I think we got what we were looking for. Jax has not yet met a dog or human that he is not content to play with or gnaw on (however the mood strikes him). And as it turns out, beyond our expectations, he is actually a pretty smart puppy. At 3.5 months old, he knows "sit" and "down" very well. He will "stay" on command easily for 1-2 minutes even when humans leave his sight. Tonight he even held a stay for 5 minutes+ while watching H and me eat our dinner in front of him. Very promising. When I say "crate" he bounds ever so awkwardly at top speed into his crate from wherever we are in the house and promptly sits in expectation. He has been known to stop so suddenly in his crate, from so great a speed, that his bed accordions into the back of the crate sending him into a skid. He is learning to "heel" and under the right conditions does so very nicely, but this one is still in progress. We work on these daily, ideally in three sessions (6am, 12pm, and 6pm) of 10-15min each, but often we only get to it twice a day.

Jax has three speeds: "idle" - sleeping too soundly to be woken by a freight train, "slow"- wandering around the house looking either for something to eat or for someone to cuddle, and "demon possessed" - running hell for leather from one end of the house to the other grabbing some forbidden material or other (blankets, shoes, underwear, and the occasional plunger) in his mouth in the short time it takes to reverse direction. In this light it really does not matter how you spell it, but the dog needs to be exercised/exorcised every day if anyone is to live with him.

Regarding walks: At first I took him with me every morning on my walk up to the church for morning prayer. Unfortunately, two barriers have ended this until further training permits. First, Jax becomes very anxious when left alone (more later), and listening to a dog whine is not particularly conducive to prayer. Second, his walking-on-leash skills deteriorated rapidly from a continually-stopping-to-smell-the-world walk on a generally slack leash to an ooh-ooh-I-know-what-smell-comes-in-a-hundred-yards-Let's-go! bout of uncomfortable pulling at the leash, all in only a few days. So, he's banned from that particular walk until he learns leash skills. To my delight though, and perhaps finding out against better judgment, he behaves very well in the open ground when off-leash. He comes without fail when recalled (thusfar), and generally walks within a few feet of me. This may just be puppy-ness, and may change as his independence grows. We will see. For now H takes him for a nice long walk in the morning, and we play in the yard in the afternoon after our obedience session and maybe go for an after dinner walk.

The great difficulty is his anxiety about being left alone. We were told when we adopted him that he was "partially crate-trained" which translates to "mostly not crate-trained" but we didn't know that at first. So on the first night we had him, we put him in his crate in the kitchen and prepared for bed. Chaos ensued as Jax the lovely cuddle dog went totally bonkers. Incidentally, that was the first time we found sure evidence of a beagle in his gene pool. Hint: think voice box. So, to compromise for the first night, I slept on the couch and he slept on the floor near by. The next day we moved the crate into the den (a more comfortable space for him, as we spend more time there and it's warmer), and proceeded to ease him into the crate mentality.

I went to PetSmart, bought him a proper bed for his crate (pet owners are suckers) and a toy that could be filled with peanut butter for distraction. We got him attached to the bed by leaving it out in the middle of the floor where he normally lies anyway. He took to the synthetic sheepskin quickly. The next step was to put it in the crate. Once we convinced him that the solution to this problem was not to drag his bed back out of the crate (comical moments... when we continuously repeat the cycle for 20 minutes or more of me putting the bed in the crate and him dragging it right back out), but rather to sleep IN the crate he was happy enough. Like I said, he's a smart dog. On the second night he slept in his crate, again with me on the couch nearby. The object, from my perspective, was to keep him calm and comfortable and slowly move out of his sight. This worked for a while, except that the further I slept from him (first the guest room which adjoins the den, and then our bedroom which is down the hall) the more times he woke up in the night and had to go outside.

A warning sign that perhaps I did not heed early enough was his whining and initial anxiety when the crate door was closed. I thought I could overcome this by calming him down verbally until he lay down and then I would go to bed. But then we just got into a cycle of doing this routine every time he woke up and realized he was alone. Each time, I would take him outside, let him "eliminate" (as the literature calls it, although his command for this is "Jax, go pee!"), and then go back in for the crating and calming. Ugh! The worst was the few nights that, after he went to bed at 10pm, we got up at 12am, 2am, 4am, and then finally for good at 6am (H told me later that day that he slept soundly all morning. Little bastard!). To my chagrin his anxiety in the crate has been growing, in part I think as an amplification of his pre-existing anxiety over being left alone - because we always put him in the crate when we leave the house for extended periods.

Then the other night I learned just how carefully I have to watch what we teach the pup. I was working on putting him in his crate, closing the door, and rewarding him when he was calm. But for some reason, I could not get him to "stay" while I was opening the door to let him out (such was his anxiety after even instantaneous closing and reopening). Then it got even more bizarre. After putting him into the crate, having him "sit" and "stay", if I even touched the OPEN crate door, he came out of his "stay" and walked out, not in a hurried-anxious-"Get me out of here" way, but in a "This is what happens next" way. Somehow we taught him that touching the crate door meant it was time to come out. Presumably, this is because every time we approach the crate while he is in it and start fiddling with the door it is for him to come out. This, despite my trying to have him "stay" while I open the door. The anxiety seems to have blocked those attempts.

That's probably enough for this posting. While Jax continues to be a great dog, we've got to figure out how to get him comfortable with being alone. In light of the above crate issues, we've returned to square one, and we're relearning how to go in the crate and "stay" until released regardless of crate door position. I'm glad he's smart, or this could be tedious.