Former Explosives Detection dog available for adoption - Page 6

OMG. AKC citation, circa 1908.
I rest my case.

LOL

It's only been over a hundred years. No chance that breed's been watered down any! 

<sigh>LoveForBrittany, again, I am not minimizing the awfulness of what happened to Brittany--and I know that it will haunt you for the rest of your llife.  And if the people who owned this dog at that time were callous and crude and heartless enough that they made no apologies, made no attempts at amends, then I hope they rot in hell, because there's simply NO excuse for that, just as there's really no justifiable excuse for them allowing their dog to run at large, either. But the fault lies not in the dog, but in the people who owned that dog and who've proven that they aren't even responsible enough to own a goldfish...THEY are responsible for the traumatic death of your elderly kitty.  If this were to happen in the county I live in, I can assure you that I'd be demanding the court punish these owners to the fullest extent of the law, in addition to ordering them to place the dog with someone capable of being responsible with him, and capable of providing the appropriate training needed to teach the dog NOT to harm small animals.

As for your forecasting that this dog was going to hurt somebody, again, while I understand WHY you feel as you do, the facts are that the dog has been just fine in his foster home, and it was only when he was shipped halfway across the country and then released onto the grounds of a busy airport where people began chasing him and strangers grabbed at him that any harm came to anyone.  Had he been met by someone dog-savvy enough to know better than to open the crate of a strange dog in an unenclosed area before having the dog secured on a leash and an unslippable collar, the events that followed would never have occurred, and everything would have been uneventful.

It is, however, unreasonable for anyone to expect you to view this dog in any other light than as a vicious, dangerous animal, given your experiences with him.  I just know that the focus of my outrage and ire would be the dog's former owners, not the dog, were I to find myself in your position...but that's because I can accept that regardless of all that they are to us and for us, cats and dogs are always going to be animals which possess prey drive, and I can't fault them for acting on that drive.

No matter how awful, I just don't understand branding the dog as anything but a dog, and going to all this trouble to prove him "not right in the head." As I said, he MIGHT be a little off...but nothing that's been said yet has hinted at that. 

My own favorite cat was killed by 2 dogs.  I was right in the middle of it all and I have the scars to prove it. No one to blame; dogs were outside, cat was inside, all of a sudden, loud noise and 2 dogs are in the kitchen, thanks to a broken door.  Long story short, when it was all over and I was on my way to the hospital, I called my bf and asked him to clean up most of the mess in my kitchen before I got home and he asked if I wanted him to put the dogs down. I was like WTF???? I said "For what?! For being DOGS???".  Even at that moment, I knew it was simply a horrible occurrence, one of those freak things that you couldn't possibly predict or recreate the exact circumstances again if you tried, and it was just bad bad timing and an accident and a horrible end to a wonderful cat. But never once did it cross my mind that there was anything "wrong" with those dogs. This was 4 years ago and neither dog has murdered anyone, let alone progressed into a serial killer. They are still just normal dogs, and actually very good dogs. 

One of the best training helpers in the country put it this way 20 years ago:
"I can chase a Dobermann off the field, stark naked with a paper bag in my hand."

britnay my friend is a pp trainer on the west coast for the last 10 years anyone who comes to him with thoughts of getting a doberman for protection he tells them to not bother and to get a german shepherd from a good breeder his words not mine but dobermans dont seem to be what they once were, his own personal dogs are bandogs.

i am sorry for the cat though the owners of the dog (correction) need to be fined and charged for being stupid the dog was doing what any high drive working gsd would do

i have cats also my dog loves them but she would kill any cat or animal that would enter her yard that she doesnt know i think most working gsds will be aggressive to unknown animals they encounter when offleash which is why owners need to keep their dogs well trained and not just let them wonder in other peoples yards to go mauling peoples pets

i also keep waterfowl my dog would have killed them also if she was not trained. Again any working gsd i think will it is stupid owners that let such things happen they need to be charged and fined u are blaming the dog for the humans mistakes which i think is wrong


and any dog can bite when it is stressed just like any cat can bite when it is stressed so i would not worry about the dog biting the people in the airport

sounds like your friend also made a horrible breed choice that breed was meant to be a sentry guard like others said,out in the country. Your friend should have got a poodle or something...

destiny4u, I think you've misread some of what love4brittany wrote--brittany was HER cat, not someone else's, and the cat was lying quietly on a chair on it's own front porch when the dog attacked her...so no, the owner of the cat shouldn't have been fined or charged, just the idiots who owned Arco at the time should have been, as they had no business allowing Arco to run at large--period. And it's brittany4u who has the Doberman, too...but you're correct, that breed in general has developed an incredibly high threshold as far as what will finally trigger them to be aggressive. The people I apprenticed under for dog training offered personal protection training to individuals whose dogs were suitable for the work and whose owners wanted such training; when they established that part of the training business, they set it up that the owner paid a flat fee for the service, regardless of whether it took 10 sessions or 100 to have the dog fully trained in the work; this, of course, was after they had done an evaluation of the dog and determined that it had the aptitude for the training. Initially this worked out well, as most of the dogs that were presented for training were GSDs or GSD crosses...there were a few Dobes here and there, but the breed was less popular, and the breed's defense threshold was still quite a bit lower than it later became, so most dogs could be finished out in less than a year with weekly sessions, and the Dobes might take an extra couple months. But then Dobes started getting popular, and the breed began to change as they fell into the hands of people who were breeding primarily for pet purposes...and the percentage of Dobes in training crept higher and higher, until finally the trainers had to restructure the training fee schedule to allow for the extra time that was needed before the Dobes would even bite the rag, let alone to engage a person. I happen to like Dobes--they're smart, they have an exquisite sense of humor, and they are incredibly tolerant of sloppy handlers...but they cope with unwanted pressure by going into the "Dobie Zone", mentally blocking the person who is the source of the pressure out of their awareness, instead of responding to the pressure actively. This can be great in a pet--assuming that the pressure is more in line with noisy kids annoying the dog--but is a problem for someone looking for a dog to defend them. The other problem is that ignorant people who are trying to get a Dobe to bite may employ less-than-humane methods to elicit the aggressive response when they don't get one in the usual way, and the Dobe may tolerate that silently, too--until one day, when it finally has had enough, and it so-called 'turns' on the person who may or may not be doing something to intentionally annoy the dog. So no, a Dobe is hardly a good example of a 'high drive working dog' when it comes to aggression, either appropriate or inappropriate.

hex i was saying the owners of the dog should be fined and charged not the cat sorry if it seemed i meant the poor cat owner should be charged i would never say that.


Britnays owner is suffering and in pain but they are taking it out on the dog when it is the dogs careless previous owners.

destiny, I agree with you on that...in truth, it would be unusual if Brittany's owner could EVER forgive the people who owned Arco then, and I can even understand why she'd feel the dog would never be trustworthy, either--I just wish she could accept that no one is asking *her* to trust the dog again, but other people still are able to do so and give him another chance now that he's been taught to leave cats alone.

Grab a scared, cornered cat and see what happens.