a quick testimonial on Jabba
A nice little comment was left on my blog this moring from the owner of Jabba, it is my personal goal to get this dog to be able to walk calmly and confidently in NYC without being fazed by anything the big city has to offer. His owner just moved there for a new job and he did not last even 24 hours and I met the owners to get him into my program, sort of like a rehab issue for any of you folks that have had loved ones go through drug or alcohol rehab.
I saw the picture of Jabba playing with Caly and after my initial shock and disbelief wore off – I have to admit that I got a little teary-eyed. As you know, we adopted Jabba several years ago after he had been sitting in a shelter for several months waiting for a home. He was just a big, goofy pile of slobbery love at first. Overtime though we realized that, although he has always been fine with our other two dogs, he had MAJOR issues related to any dog he met on the street or at the park. After breaking up many intense fights at the local dog park we resigned ourselves to avoiding any and all contact between Jabba and any other dogs for fear that he would hurt one of them and we would have to put him down. We had to start leaving him home for all of the animal related outings we did like the Providence Animal Rescue League yearly pet walk (which is the shelter we got him from), the dog park, and even walks in our neighborhood. It made me sad but I didn’t know what else to do to ensure the safety of other dogs we might encounter. Sometimes we would try walking him very late at night just to avoid the possibility of running into another dog.
Considering it has only been 5 days, I am really excited to see how far Jabba will come over the course of the next 5 weeks. I really appreciate and am inspired by how willing you are to work with dogs that no one else will work with. For you to day-in and day-out expose your own dogs and your family to dogs like Jabba that have aggression issues just speaks to your ability and commitment to your clients and dogs in general. Not to mention the balls it takes to be willing to get bit over and over and not get frustrated with a dog or give up on them. So THANK YOU. You might be expensive (ha ha) but to see Jabba actually playing with another dog and not trying to rip its face off – that’s priceless in my book. He deserves that. And I have to warn you – I may cry a little bit when I come to pick him up if I see him playing with other dogs. Because I really, truly believed that I would never get to see that.
I was contacted by Brown University the other week about a study they wanted to do and this is what we came up with and I am helping them spearhead it, today we had a meeting to finalize the study and we will be starting it next month.
This is Uma just hanging out as usual