Electrolicious

Last year I watched this video and laughed and laughed and laughed. This is my response.

My friend Ellen dog-sits Sassafras once a week, and has been debating whether she should get Sassy a dog bed for her house. Ellen finally gave in and bought a dog bed yesterday, and then she made this video:

It was one year ago today that I drove with Dawn over the Cascade mountains to go meet Sassafras. We looked like a pink-haired lesbian couple, and my first encounter with Sassafras was watching her hop out of her foster-family’s pick up, and immediately skulk away with her tail tucked.

Dawn, who’s worked with service dogs and knows dog behavior better than I do, immediately identified her as a submissive and therefore good dog — her first impression has proven to be absolutely right. I asked the foster family a couple cursory questions (Q: “What’s her big flaw?” A: “She’s needy and just wants to be on your lap 24/7″) but I was pretty much immediately smitten.
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Welcome Home! from arielmeadow on Vimeo.

We just got a beautiful little rescue chihuahua, and I keep thinking about Sassafras and what sort of dog she is and how you adjusted to having a dog in your busy working lives - I’m sure I could glean some of your wisdom in our first few weeks with nano! How did life change? Does Sass have any nervousness or fearfulness issues (nano does!)? Any sources of advice you found useful? Was Sass housetrained when you got her, or was there an adjustment period?

Sassafras was definitely a nervous dog when we first got her, and she’s still somewhat shy. That said, moving to Capitol Hill did wonders for her confidence — the two walks a day are full of bonding time as well as nonstop stimulus in the form of other people, dogs, smells, weird garbage in the street, etc. She’s gotten way better socialized just by living in a place where we walk her more.

Also, taking a dog training class made a big difference, not because she needed to be more obedient (she’s ridiculously submissive and a very good dog) but because it gave me clicker training tools to reward her and make her feel good about herself. It’s weird: dogs just want to make you happy. If they don’t know what they need to do, they get anxious. Clickers make it really easy to let them know what you like, and give them clear rewards when they do it.

In terms of how life changed, it’s definitely happier! Sassafras stayed with my mom while we were in Iowa last week, and my mom had her for a couple days on either end of the trip … it was odd being at our house without Sassafras! We missed her presence so much. Coming home is much more fun with a dog. At our place, it means a couple quick hello barks and much scrabbling of toenails on the floor and lots of full body wiggling. It used to mean a little leaking pee, too (aka “Submissive Urination“) but that went away once we figured out that we needed to stop getting her too excited when we got home. That’s different than housetraining though — she was already housetrained when we got her, so I can’t really answer that question.

I’m actually going to punt this question to my friend Dawn, who got a rescue chihuahua named Sprocket in June and had no shortage of challenges with him. He peed everywhere, attacked her friends (drawing blood once!), freaked out whenever anyone got near Dawn. I think she’s used a lot of Cesar Milan’s techniques — the first episode ever of The Dog Whisperer is all about an aggressive rescued chihuahua named Nunu.

Dawn’s thoughts are in the comments.

A few weeks ago, Gwen came to rework our living room while The Seattle Times watched. Here’s the resulting article, and of course Miss Sassafras plays a role:

In the spirit of Halloween …