Difficult Decisions

I think I have to euthanize Ten.

A month ago he went after an 18-pound male cocker that got snotty with him. He got hold of the little guy and shook him and would not let go. I don't know how the cocker came out of that encounter alive, but he did. Friday night he went after Lumi. They've tussled in the past but it's never been serious - nobody's ever gotten hurt worse than a tooth scrape or bloody lip - and they've either been easy to separate or they've stopped on their own after a minute or so. And then they've been fine together again. But Friday night, as they were coming in from their bedtime 'out', they got into it and this time it was serious. I'm really not quite sure what set it off, whether Lumi made a warning face at Ten or whether he might have even gotten into his "come another inch closer and I'll beat the crap out of you" stance and Ten was just fed up, or what. Whatever it was, Ten attacked him and this time it turned into an all-out fight for dominance. I couldn't separate them, after trying for a couple of minutes with no success (and having pulled muscles in my back trying) I had to step out and let them fight until they started to tire. Only then was I able to get a good grip on Ten's collar to twist it and cut off his air, and get my back up against a wall where I was able to use my foot/leg to keep Lumi from coming back at Ten once Ten let go. Lumi got beat up pretty good, it wasn't just spit and toothscrapes, there was torn skin on his flank from where Ten grabbed him and shook, and a pretty good gash on his thigh.

Ten's been on NILIF ever since. I moved his crate out of my bedroom and out to the family room. I've kept him and Lumi away from each other, giving Lumi time in the yard first and then putting Ten out in the yard only when Lumi's back inside and back in his crate. He's been spending time out in the yard with Blizzard, Spot, and Nellie, and sometimes Tansy. Every once in a while Nellie gets a bug in her ear and takes a couple of chomps at Tansy. I holler at her, she quits, and that's that.

Some of my friends from the volunteer thing I do maintain a 2-mile stretch of highway, picking up trash a couple of times a year. I live right in the middle of that 2-mile stretch. I saw these friends in front of the house this morning and went out to say hi. Blizzard, Ten, Spot, Nellie, and Tansy were in the yard. The friends wanted to see the dogs, and came up to the fence. Tansy's got a bad habit of pushing past/over other dogs to get to people. It's very rude, from a canine point of view, and any dog with any sense of canine manners just doesn't do it. But Tansy has no canine manners, is frequently very rude with other big dogs, and often gets scolded by them as a result.

(I had another foster dog a long time ago with the same insensibility of canine manners that Tansy has. Like her, he was a great dog. Very sweet, very people-oriented, and just a little too needy. He used to bump other dogs out of the way to get to me, or walk on them if they were on the floor between him and me. He used to get smacked for his rudeness on a regular basis, too. And, also like Tansy, he never learned the lesson.)

Anyway, Tansy wanted to see the people, and pushed Nellie. Nellie objected with her teeth. I yelled at her, she quit, but just that little bit of tension was like a flash in a powder keg. Blizzard saw her opportunity to take a swipe at Tansy, too. Blizz hates rude dogs in general, and dislikes Tansy in particular, but doesn't mess with her beyond a warning because she knows she'll be in trouble if she does. (She has learned self-restraint over the years. It took a long time, though.) Blizz jumped into the fray and it probably would have ended there pretty quick, but Ten jumped in on Blizzard. By the time I got out to them, only Ten and Blizzard were involved and Ten was winning. I finally got him to let go of her, and kept her from coming back at him immediately by pushing her away once with my foot on her shoulder.

Ten has gotten too big for his britches. He doesn't have much impulse control to start with, and he's gained a new sense of power from the altercations of the last few weeks. He's gone from the somewhat submissive boy who takes a scolding, backs off and says "hey, I didn't mean anything by it" to being king of the hill with no idea how to handle the power he's recently discovered he has. I don't know if I can fix it, or if he'll grow out of it (like Blizzard did), or even if I should try/wait. After Friday's fight with Lumi, I said "that's two strikes, one more and I'm going to have a hard decision to make." I can't decide if this qualifies as the third strike or not.

I know exactly what provoked this morning's fight, and the circumstances were unusual. I can absolutely prevent the occurrence of a similar trigger, and I can keep Ten apart from everyone but Spot and Nellie while I put him on an intense program of exercise and discipline. They've always been submissive to him, and he's always known it. He has nothing to prove with them, and they're not interested in provoking him. They're good friends, it's safe to put them out together.

When Ten and Lumi fought, only a physical barrier would have prevented either of them from trying to get to the other one again. Even if I'd been able to get them apart, a dirty look would have been all it took to get it started again. This morning, once I got Ten and Blizzard separated and pushed her away when she made her one attempt to come back at him and teach him a lesson, he did not try to re-engage even though she was glaring at him, but stood vigilant yet calm by my side. (I had my hand through the loop in his martingale collar so I could stop him if he tried to re-engage, but he's 105 pounds and if he really wanted to go back at her he'd have dragged me along with him.) I don't know whether that's because she doesn't make him as angry as Lumi does, if once he took a step back he remembered that she's higher in the pack order than he is, or if it's because he's beginning to learn how to regain his self-control after he loses it.

On the other hand, I don't know if I can fix him. And while I will do my very best to be as vigilant as possible to keep him apart from dogs other than Spot and Nellie - and Tansy, who is so far beneath his radar that she basically doesn't exist in his world - and I'm better set up here to keep dogs separated than I was before, I'm not perfect and I can't be sure I won't screw up. I have before, when I've had to keep dogs separated. It's not fair to Blizzard or Lumi for me to keep a dog that's aggressive toward them. I'm not sure I'm physically capable of handling him; I could have ten years ago, but handling him when he's not complying is a lot tougher now and I hurt more and longer afterward. Shoot, I was sore for a week after wrestling him into the bathtub a while back. My wrists still hurt this morning from Friday's incident; they hurt worse now, and after a couple of hours my forearms still feel like jelly. I can feel the muscles in my back and my hamstrings tightening, and I know I'm going to be stiff and sore tomorrow.

I don't know what to do. I know what I should do, I just don't know that I'm ready to. I don't know if I can unless I know I did my best to try to fix him, and I don't know if I could forgive myself if someone else gets hurt while I tried. If I thought, by any stretch of the imagination, that Ten was aggressive toward humans, the decision would be simple and inarguable. It's not so clear cut when a dog is safe with humans but not with other dogs.

(No, I will not re-home him if I can't fix him.)