Personal Essays

He lunges at the passing car, stripping the canvas of the leash through my hand. He hits the end of the line hard and then bounces back, shaking his head. He turns and sees the look on my face and falls immediately to the ground, eyes big and pleading, “I’m sorry mom, I just couldn’t help it. It was going so fast.” He needs a lot of work.

He played well with our dogs, and joined them in their exploits. We learned the impossibility of stopping three dogs from rolling in the kelp beds, or barking at each other, or playing keep-away. Rather than pulling his behavior up, he pulled theirs down. I believe it is referred to as mob mentality.

While his quirks and bad habits made us fall in love with him, we still needed to try to teach him better manners if anyone was going to want to adopt him. Training Taz was an interesting experience. He managed to combine the extreme intelligence of a cattle dog with the attention span of a gnat.

The worst was the motorcycles. Just the sound of one would send him onto a frenzy. No-pull harness be damned, he was going to herd that machine! Trying to teach Taz not to pull was like trying to teach stop a runaway freight train by standing in front of it.

We didn’t have long to work, though, before we had the ultimate success. He had an adopter! It was simple really, we did almost nothing and here was this match. A match that seemed as good as it could get. So, after not long in our home, we sent Taz off to his new owner, saying goodbye to our happy go-lucky goofy boy. This fostering thing wasn’t so hard after all.