**This blog was written by the volunteer who took Gunner home**
Yay, I got to bring Gunner home tonight! The car ride from the kennel to my home went better than expected. Gunner sat there looking out all of the car windows at the cars and scenery and was pretty calm...until we hit 40 during a high traffic period! Once those big trucks started coming to our side, Gunner started to panic - pacing fast in the back of the car. Of course this was understandable given that he has never been in a car before. Even so, by the time we got home BOTH of us were pretty stressed out!
When Gunner entered our house, I can only imagine the sensory overload he must have experienced. Different floors, wide open space, ceiling fans, different noises, a thing called a TV, an active 8 year old child and the list goes on! Just being around people is a challenge for this boy. We always knew that Gunner and Queenie (the two youngest GSDs) would be the hardest to rehabilitate. Both these dogs have had extremely limited exposure to humans, other dogs, and life outside of the kennel. The older dogs had been show dogs, and even though it had been several years, they were at one point exposed to humans and dogs in the show ring. They'd also been handled, after all, they had to be tolerant of touch and well behaved in order to win all those ribbons that decorated their kennels. The young ones, however, had never entered the show arena, due to the fact that they were born at a time when the owners health had already started to decline. Despite all of this, and despite never having been in a house before, Gunner took everything in stride...well, almost everything - the stairs terrified him!! We got him to go up ok, if he was on a leash, but going down the stairs proved to be a different story. One or two steps might not have been a problem, but 8 stairs was terrifying. In Gunner's mind, there was no walking down, he would jump down. Just take a flying leap and clear all 8 steps at once! My husband caught him twice while he was airborne!
Gunner's first night was very unsettled. He is so hand shy! After being in the house a while and seeing how things worked (and seeing how calm our other dogs were), he would come to me and lick me on the hand, then walk quickly away. His way of handling stress is to pace, no doubt a learned coping mechanism he had to use while he was in his small run at the kennel. He also paced a lot in his crate when it was time for us to go to bed. None of us got much sleep. He pretty much demanded to be let out of his crate, but we knew we needed to ride it out for a while. When you first start crating a dog, it is like putting a child to bed and they start crying. You have to let that child cry for a while, otherwise, they learn real quick that if they cry, they will get picked up. The same goes for crate training a dog. You have to try and out last them sometimes. At the same time though, you have to know when it becomes too much, since crating needs to be viewed as a positive experience and the actual crate a safe place. Apparently Gunner had never read the dog journals we had about this topic as he wanted nothing to do with his crate, period! While we were laying there listening to him pace, whine, and bark, all the while our hearts breaking because we knew he was confused and scared, we suddenly heard a loud bang! We ran to see what was going on and, much to our surprise, Gunner was out of his crate looking up at us. The crate doors were closed, so how the heck? He did this once more before I finally let him win half way at 2:00 am. I brought my pillow on the floor in front of his crate and laid down with him, with my hand up on the crate door to offer reassurance. FINALLY he laid down in the crate at 6:40 am the next morning..... 5 min before I had to get up for work :(
This first night with Gunner was by far the most challenging time I have had fostering a dog. Considering it has been approximately 2 1/2 months since Angie has been going over to feed and spend time with the fabulous five, I can only imagine what Gunner was like when she first started going if he is still this anxious now. However, having seen the progress that the dogs are making, compared to how they were when we were first introduced to them, I am remaining positive and believe that Gunner, like the other dogs in the kennel, is a survivor and will one day thrive in a loving, patient home. That said, please pray that he sleeps tonight!!
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