The Puppers

Don't you love how I'm introducing my entire life to you? Hopefully I'll still have stuff to write about when I am done. I don't have kids yet (oh right, that's another post), so it's not going to take very long.

Right.

The Puppers. AKA Pupperooni, the Puppermeister, the Pupscicle (yes, I really call her all of those things, it's a good thing she can't talk). She has a real name too, but from here on out she will be known as The Puppers.

The Puppers is a mixed breed Canaan dog who we adopted from the JSPCA (like ASPCA but with a J for Jerusalem). If you don't know what a Canaan dog is, check out this site. That little barking dog icon in the ASPCA breed guide doesn't even begin to describe the watchdog instincts of this doggy. Click here to read more about Canaan dogs, they are incredibly interesting because they still have a lot of natural instincts that other dogs have had bred out of them. Basically, to sum it up, Canaan dogs are such good watchdogs because they are weary of everything. This stems from having such a strong survival instinct in the desert; they don't trust anyone except for their owners.

Now, if I can draw your attention back to the ASPCA guide linked to above, down at the bottom of the page, "Special Alerts: The Canaan is not suitable for inexperienced dog owners." And what would we be? Inexperienced dog owners! Not just inexperienced, but I personally had an extreme dog phobia until very recently.

So, how did we end up with said type of dog? Well, we wanted to adopt a puppy from the shelter so we went and brought home this:

Isn't she cute!!!!

She was just an innocent ball of brown and white fur. None of the people at the shelter had any idea what kind of dog she was. They said that she (and her other five sisters) were midsize (at least they got that right), mutts, nothing more and nothing less. So, we decided to take a chance and took her.

She drove us crazy with normal puppy stuff. But she had a ridiculous amount of energy even for a puppy, plus she was damn stubborn. We tried training her with basic commands and she would have none of it. Sure she would do it for a treat, but she's not a normal dog and food is not necessarily top of her priority list, she had her own plans.

Then the barking started.

She wasn't the type of dog to sit at home and bark all day, but when there was a reason to bark (someone at the door, cat by the window), it was the most important thing on the face of the earth and nothing could stop her. It got to the point that we had to avoid people on the street because she would bark at people on the street who felt that people were entering our private space (ahh, girl after my own heart). So we decided that the only way we could keep her was to hire a professional trainer.

To be continued...