We are going to have to get rid of Shiloh. Over the past 6 weeks she has gotten to be more and more of a handful. She is not making any strides to stop having accidents the minute she gets on the carpet. She has chews up every thing she can find--besides many toys and other things, she chewed up two shoes (Stride Rite tennis shoes and a pair of Crocs), my drapes and Mimi's sweater. She also steals things off the table. Two times we even found her standing right in the middle of the table. And she doesn't just get food off the table, she also gets pencils and toys that were left on the table and chews them up.
Additionally, she is wild. We knew this when we found her, but we thought with training she would calm down. She hasn't. She has actually gotten worse. Now she jumps up on us with her mouth open and teeth exposed. She is not violent, just wild. She bites at all of our feet and hands. She jumps up at the boys faces with her mouth open. When she started doing that, I was done.
She has a sweet way about her, once I calm her down. Malachi and Ezra are terrified to walk near her and that is definitely not what I want. Even Jonah and Isaiah run away from her screaming. Once she is calmed down, they love on her, but I am really the only one that can calm her. We have to keep company away from her and protect Granny from her.
Elijah and Jonah are very attached to her -- despite her faults. They both cried when we broke the news to them this morning. We told them that we would look for another dog before we got rid of her. So they wanted to go right away.
We went to two "pet adoption" places today. Most of the dogs that we saw were under 2. I didn't really fall in love with any of them, even though the boys found several they wanted to adopt. We came home without a dog, but I came home with a new perspective: teaching an older dog good habits involves breaking bad habits. I starting wondering if teaching a puppy from infancy to behave and obey, might be easier. Shiloh's bad habits overshadow her good ones, but it isn't because she couldn't be taught to behave, I am just not sure I am the one to teach her (when it means protecting my children from her while I am doing it).
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Though not the same, we had to get rid of my dog of 12 years when I was pregnant with Katherine. She was old and wanted to be left alone and the kids just wanted her to play. It was a tough decision but the right one at the time. I'm of the no dogs with little kids mindset, but only because it just didn't work out well for us.
ReplyDeleteUnrelated comment: you are going to catch up with Gretchen in all these blog posts recently. :-)
I get behind on the posts, but I want it all documented for my records, so I just post them anyway -- even if they are a month late.
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