Growing old with the children

Several months ago we lost a service dog that had been with us for most of his 22 years. He was an expert in reading people, identifying their emotional issue and letting the person know that help was there for them and that all problems are solvable. We had to replace him in our lives, but we knew that any replacement would bring their own personality to the job. Our search for a replacement service animal ended with two replacement dogs that joined with two other dogs in our household. All our household companions are rescued animals and training them is an interesting process that focuses on persuading them that they want to do the job they are being considered for.

Our oldest service animal is now retired, sleeping a lot and keeping the food bowls clean for the other guys. The working senior is an 8 year old Papillion who will culminate her training by becoming a cadaver search dog. What to train the two new dogs for has been a challenge since small dogs fill a special working niche that bigger animals sometimes don’t do well at.  Right now it looks like the older of the pair, a 6 year old Papillion will need lots of work before certifying as a Search and Rescue animal and the baby of the family is a 4 month old Long hair Chihuahua who already has told us she wants to be an emotional support animal for disaster responders.

As working animals we depend on them to be responsive to our commands, but able to reason and perform on their own. Sometimes this backfires and we learn that small animals can cause big concerns.

Yesterday we let them run the yard and they managed to find perhaps the one unsecured area in the fence that allowed them to run free and cause their humans a few moments of deep concern (or should that be “terror”?). It started with a phone call from a motorist who had seen two of the dogs running through a school yard, managed to corral one and get our contact information off her harness. The second dog ran away, but as we saw him looking very lost and scared and when he saw us his attitude seemed to be “where did you go to? I’m lost and I’m glad you found me.

The last member of the escape party was nowhere to be found and we were concerned about the survivability of a two pound Chihuahua in a land populated with coyotes. Fortunately I decided to walk a small drainage area and found the culprit in short order, and had to endure a complete face wash and a complaint that we had gone away and left her alone in the wilderness.

Needless to say, all the miscreants are presently on short leash probation and remedial training on close to home and the humans has started. The humans have also improved the dog proofing of the yard and are considering locater collars.