I know…she looks kinda friendly and sweet but believe me, our Beatrice doggy has been quite a handful right from the get go.
We adopted her at age 1 from an old American lady in Punta Gorda (Ms. Letty). Everyone knows Ms. Letty because she has been around for a long, long time and now she is one of these retired old, harmless ladies who likes to while away her hours on a recliner watching American sitcoms. However, for reasons unknown to any of us (we have all speculated but can not find a logical answer) she acquired Beatrice as a puppy and wanted to raise her as a “house dog” in a her tiny, little house. Ms. Letty also owns a chihuahua so we are not sure why she insisted upon having a rotweiller/pitbull as another house pet. Anyway, the dog did not go according to plan since she ended up being energetic and feisty and far too big to be kept indoors. I think Ms. Letty tried really hard to hold onto Beatrice (one year of doggy bouncy madness) but what really clinched it in the end, was when Beatrice started eating the house walls.
At this point, we decided that we needed a farm dog and Ms. Letty was very happy to let Beatrice come to us since we had a huge place for the dog to run around in.
I will not even attempt to paint a romantic picture of this dog. She is a killer dog and she systematically killed one goose, five ducks and maimed one cat in the course of her time here. She seldom responds to commands (maybe “sit” sometimes). Otherwise, she is bouncing about, slobbering and whipping herself up into a killing frenzy for anything she can get her hands on. You will not believe the number of chances we have given her and each time, her killing instinct gets the better of her. In order to protect our animals, she is now regrettably tied up on a long chain and we take her on supervised walks (on the leash) through-out the day.
It is not a bad life for a dog on the farm but we would honestly like her to roam around freely without all these restrictions.
Beatrice is 3 years old now and we have decided to give it one more chance. Well, we saved our pennies up and bought a dog training collar. So far, we have been using it for 5 days only. And, I am very glad to say that she is responding really well, just to the beeping noise. She can respond to 4 commands already and she is behaving consistently. We are so pleased with our doggie rehabilitation; we are going to continue commands on the leash for another two weeks and the next step will be “off the leash.”
Our ultimate hope is that she can run freely around the farm eventually.
Also, after that, we need to move onto Doggy Rehab 2 with Shaneeka, the guinea-pig stalker. She also has quite a history but I will talk about her another time!
