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help me name my dog!
Jun. 7th, 2010 12:37 pmI haven't posted in like a week, I think, and now I can't decide what to write about first? Should I talk about Sealion War, or my beads, how exhausted I am, or the dog?
I think I'll take the somewhat easy route, and talk about the dog. :)
puppy!
Ok, so maybe not so much a puppy. He's actually a 3 year old purebred Akita that just about fell into our laps last week.
To make a long story short, someone my work bookkeeper knew was just going to have him put down because he "couldn't find anyone to take him", and couldn't keep him, and I couldn't BEAR for that to happen, so I said we'd foster him and find him a new home. Except the boyfriend fell in love with the dog, so said new home appears to be OUR home.
This is both ok and not ok. We are allowed dogs in our building, so that's not a problem. We're technically 1 pet over the limit, however I suspect that considering the building is half empty and they're having trouble keeping responsible tenants (ie. ones that aren't dealing drugs out of their suite, or getting high and pulling fire alarms, like what happened this morning), an extra pet is going to be pretty minor on the grand scale of things.
Some friends have shown concern, but we have the time to take care of the dog, we can afford it, and we have a built-in dogsitter almost anytime we need one (Ian's sister) - yesterday we asked her if she'd be up for housesitting to take care of the animals if we want to go away, and she was all "hell yeah, anytime!" Akitas are a breed that will happily take all the exercise they can get, but they don't require more than 30-60 minutes a day of walking, which isn't a problem at all. Plus there's a dog park right across the street from our condo building!
He's big, yes - about 120 pounds, we're guessing - but the Akita is actually a breed that does quite well in an apartment. They're VERY quiet - he's been with us almost a week and I haven't heard him bark once yet. He has a happy love growl that I've heard a couple times when cuddling him - it's almost like a cat's purr. Akitas will make a "woo" sound out of happiness as well, but it's not a bark or a howl. He absolutely loves human companionship, and is TOTALLY not an Alpha-dog at all, which is making for each training and control. Akitas are known for not playing so well with other dogs, but because he's so submissive, he's doing fairly well for his level of training. Ian walked him past a fenced yard with two off-leash Rottweilers in it on Saturday, and the dog didn't even blink, let alone bar or pull.
He's also really self-aware, in that he doesn't knock things over, or off of surfaces with his tail. His tail hangs straight down and he generally doesn't wag it - when he's happy, he curls it up over his back into a full circle, and it wobbles back and forth a bit, but because it's curled, it can't go far enough to damage anything.
The amount of fur in the house is annoying, but Ian wants to keep him so badly that he has vacuumed the carpet twice in the past 5 days without me even asking. He's also agreed to take on every cent of his upkeep (which is good, because I already pay for the cats on my own) - including neutering (the idiots who had him before didn't neuter him...grrrrrr), and obedience classes. He's doing most of the walking right now too, simply because the dog is so strong that he almost pulls my arm out of its socket. We're working on training him to not pull so much.
There are challenges there definitely - the dog was raised in Chinese of some sort (I don't know which dialect), so while he's somewhat trained, he doesn't respond to English commands. He also doesn't even know his own name (which is currently Smokey). This isn't so bad, because it'll make it easy to change his name because I don't like the name Smokey AT ALL.
I have no idea what to name him though. Any suggestions?
I think I'll take the somewhat easy route, and talk about the dog. :)
puppy!
Ok, so maybe not so much a puppy. He's actually a 3 year old purebred Akita that just about fell into our laps last week.
To make a long story short, someone my work bookkeeper knew was just going to have him put down because he "couldn't find anyone to take him", and couldn't keep him, and I couldn't BEAR for that to happen, so I said we'd foster him and find him a new home. Except the boyfriend fell in love with the dog, so said new home appears to be OUR home.
This is both ok and not ok. We are allowed dogs in our building, so that's not a problem. We're technically 1 pet over the limit, however I suspect that considering the building is half empty and they're having trouble keeping responsible tenants (ie. ones that aren't dealing drugs out of their suite, or getting high and pulling fire alarms, like what happened this morning), an extra pet is going to be pretty minor on the grand scale of things.
Some friends have shown concern, but we have the time to take care of the dog, we can afford it, and we have a built-in dogsitter almost anytime we need one (Ian's sister) - yesterday we asked her if she'd be up for housesitting to take care of the animals if we want to go away, and she was all "hell yeah, anytime!" Akitas are a breed that will happily take all the exercise they can get, but they don't require more than 30-60 minutes a day of walking, which isn't a problem at all. Plus there's a dog park right across the street from our condo building!
He's big, yes - about 120 pounds, we're guessing - but the Akita is actually a breed that does quite well in an apartment. They're VERY quiet - he's been with us almost a week and I haven't heard him bark once yet. He has a happy love growl that I've heard a couple times when cuddling him - it's almost like a cat's purr. Akitas will make a "woo" sound out of happiness as well, but it's not a bark or a howl. He absolutely loves human companionship, and is TOTALLY not an Alpha-dog at all, which is making for each training and control. Akitas are known for not playing so well with other dogs, but because he's so submissive, he's doing fairly well for his level of training. Ian walked him past a fenced yard with two off-leash Rottweilers in it on Saturday, and the dog didn't even blink, let alone bar or pull.
He's also really self-aware, in that he doesn't knock things over, or off of surfaces with his tail. His tail hangs straight down and he generally doesn't wag it - when he's happy, he curls it up over his back into a full circle, and it wobbles back and forth a bit, but because it's curled, it can't go far enough to damage anything.
The amount of fur in the house is annoying, but Ian wants to keep him so badly that he has vacuumed the carpet twice in the past 5 days without me even asking. He's also agreed to take on every cent of his upkeep (which is good, because I already pay for the cats on my own) - including neutering (the idiots who had him before didn't neuter him...grrrrrr), and obedience classes. He's doing most of the walking right now too, simply because the dog is so strong that he almost pulls my arm out of its socket. We're working on training him to not pull so much.
There are challenges there definitely - the dog was raised in Chinese of some sort (I don't know which dialect), so while he's somewhat trained, he doesn't respond to English commands. He also doesn't even know his own name (which is currently Smokey). This isn't so bad, because it'll make it easy to change his name because I don't like the name Smokey AT ALL.
I have no idea what to name him though. Any suggestions?