King Goes Home

We dropped King off with his new parents today around noon. Of course on the way down there, he managed to bang himself up and get a cut near his eye, so they probably think we beat him. He is just absolutely going to love his new home and Weimeraner friends to play with. He was very eager to get going and jumped up against their car a couple times. Guess we're chopped liver, lol.



giving nachobear some final abuse

It's funny, but somehow fosters always seem to know when it's time to go to their new forever home and they don't look back. It's such a pleasure to know that you've helped, but the first couple of days without them are tough.

We're gonna get the roof on the house redone and then we have room for another foster so we'll keep everyone posted :)

YAY! King has been adopted

Ok all you slugs, you missed out on adopting a really cute dog!

We got news earlier this week that a family back down near Omaha would like to adopt King. They have other dogs, cats, horses and are experienced Dobe owners. It sounds like the perfect match. Our kids will be here this weekend, so they'll be happy to get to see King Ralph again before he goes off to his new life. We're going to make the exchange on Saturday (sniff sniff!), so here are some photos to tide you over until the big day:


sleeping in fosterdad's lap. it's amazing how small such a big dog can make himself.




hehehe. "save me obi-wan!"

It's always tough parting with a fosterpuppy, but it's really a happy day too, and very gratifying to know that you've helped. One more adopted means one more foster we have room for :)

P.S. We're taking the harness back to Petsmart. Too unwieldy and he won't need it at his new home anyhow. He hasn't gone over the fence since the night we corrected him, so perhaps he's learned his lesson.

Entanglements

Wow. This no-jump harness is really a contraption. If you are mechanically impaired, this is not the tool for you. It seems to work, but it's very unwieldy to get on and off and prevents him also from running and playing outside, which we aren't very pleased about. I'm also curious how one prevents the harness from being urinated upon. Blech.

See harness here

The neighbor cats were kind enough to entice him to leap at the fence this evening and allow us to correct him, so at least we know what sets him off (not that we have any control over it). I don’t think he’s triggered by neighbor dogs walking by (with or without their people) although he does bark at them. If he was, he’d have been over the fence many, many times by now as there is a lot of dogwalking traffic by our house daily and a couple of neighbor dogs (every color lab and a great dane) that escape their respective yards with regularity.

We have a few other options we can try with him as well:

Extend a flexi-lead about 6' and lock it. attach to collar before letting him out. dragging the lead apparently makes dogs not want to jump, and if they do jump, the handle of the flexi is likely to remain caught on the fence, so they will not get far. If you use this technique, please PLEASE be careful that your dog has enough lead spooled out to land safely on the other side of your fence should they jump over. We had a friend whose dog hung herself because she'd jumped over the fence while tied out and couldn't reach the ground. Tragic.

We have an electronic training collar we could try with him. The caveat here is that he's so clever (as our previous dobes were) that he will likely quickly associate the collar with the correction and save his shenanigans for times he doesn't have the collar on.

Figure some way to run an electric wire along the section of fence he's most likely to go over (the front and part of the eastern side) and let him deter himself. This worked great with one of our previous labs and we only ever had to have the electric fence on once!

Don't let him out unsupervised. Alas, he is a lot faster than either of us on foot, so if he decides to run at the fence and get over, he's likely to be able to do so faster than we can stop him. Us being out there with him tonight didn't seem to deter him from trying to make it over as he did it several times in front of us.

Huge thanks to Auntie Ceilidh (Doberman rescue, Salem OR) for the flexi idea!

We'll keep everyone posted.

If you'd like to adopt King Ralph in spite of his "youthful exuberance", please apply here! He really is a wonderful dog.

Bo-oing

Ok, I take back what I said about King not challenging fences. He's managed to get over our 4' fence twice now, so today we're going to go get him a "no-jump harness" (thank goodness our rescue people are geniuses, we didn't know what to do other than watch him like a hawk) and break him of the habit. He doesn't go far, and comes back when we call him, but it's sooooo dangerous for him to be running around off-leash. We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood, but we're not that far from some busy roads.

Other than that, he's been his usual goofy cute self. We're in the middle of teaching him that he doesn't ALWAYS have to be on the couch and that dogs CAN lie on the floor/carpet. He's sleeping through the night in his own bed and spending most of the day playing with Echo and napping. The two of them are still like siblings... playing hard and then snipping at each other when one of them "crosses the line". No real fights, just squabbles just like kids.

Another update: we've started calling him "King Ralph" instead of just "King". Seems to suit him better. If you haven't seen the film, you should!

Will keep everyone posted on how the harness works.

If you would like to adopt King Ralph, please apply here.