A year ago on June9, we adopted our second dog. We found him at the local humane society. We were originally looking for a bigger dog since we both really like the giant breeds. But both of the big ones at the shelter were not the right fit. One was not very dog friendly and we do have Lambeau, so that crossed him off the list right away. The other was sweet, but when we did a meet and greet with Lambeau, she did not appreciate his rather boisterous play style. So, we were walking through the shelter again, looking at the dogs they had available. One of the staff had suggested Tucker’s sister as a possibility, and she was cute, but we saw this gray fellow with the light colored eyes next to her. The card said he was her sister (his name was Berlin at the shelter). We liked his unusual coloring, so we asked to have him meet Lambeau. They hit it off right away. Berlin, now renamed Tucker, came home with us right then.
He was quiet and a bit reserved at first. He has a very sweet personality and showed himself to be a real cuddler right away. He got pretty attached to me almost immediately, but I am the one who feeds, walks, trains, and does all that for both dogs and the cat, so that’s not really odd. He was unsure of the BaldMan, and still can be at times. We wonder if there was some issue with men in his past. We don’t know a lot about that, since he was a transfer from a shelter in Georgia. He was only a year and a half old at the time, and we suspect he might have been born in the shelter since there isn’t a lot of history about him. We did a DNA test and he is just about half American Pit Bull terrier and half American Staffordshire terrier. He gets his coloring from the staffy side, where he would be labeled a silver fawn. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?
He’s grown into himself in the year we’ve had him. He barks, like most dogs. It’s different for us, because Lambeau rarely barks. I’ve been working on that with him, as he loves to sit across the back of the sofa and watch the neighborhood. Which also means he barks at everyone who walks by. It’s worse if they are walking a dog. It’s slow but at least we have gotten to the point where he does not run back and forth in the house barking for minutes after the person has gone out of sight. He is a bit reactive, not in an overly aggressive way, but he gets overstimulated easily. Walking was a bit of a chore as he would be on high alert as soon as we left the driveway and seeing someone walking toward or away from us blocks away would get him over his threshold of attention. I’ve been working with him for a while with a trainer in a reactivity class and that has helped a lot.
He’s really a sweet little (I say little because he’s smaller than Lambeau’s 70 lbs. Tucker is still at 50 lbs., so he’s not a small dog!) guy, and we love him a lot. Very glad we stuck with the process of finding the right dog.
Happy Gotcha Day, Tucker!
My latest book is a collection of very short stories, half science fiction and half fantasy, called “Crossed Wires and Other Very Short Stories”. I have also written a few other short pieces, another collection, two novels, and an urban fantasy series. You can find most of them at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and wherever e-books are sold. A few are also available from Amazon in paperback. My novel, “Circle Unbroken” is also on Kindle Unlimited, if that’s your reading preference. You can find out about all of them here.
There are also some stories you can read here on my site, mostly the yearly Halloween short I write, but there are a few others. You can read them from here
His barking style sounds very familiar.
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