We first brought Belle into our home in January of 2021. She was our eighth foster after losing our previous dog to cancer in 2018. Belle was approximately 8 months old and had been surrendered after being discovered by a landlord in an apartment that did allow dogs. She was then adopted and immediately returned for being too rambunctious, which is when we started fostering her.
Our initial impression of Belle was that she was simply an untrained, unsocialized puppy and that with lots of exercise and enrichment, she would be a great dog. She was easily excitable, mouthy, jumpy, and demanding, but intelligent, motivated and eager to please.
We knew that we wanted to start a family after getting married in October 2021, and that our lives would change, but we thought that Belle would outgrow what we saw as puppy behavior by then. So we ended up foster failing in March 2021.
Over the next year Belle grew into a wonderful dog. She still had lots of energy to burn but we were able to keep her exercised with morning walks, evening trips to the dog park and occasional visits to doggie daycare. She had some poor manners at the park at the beginning, but eventually she became a model visitor. Through it all, she played rough, but listened to us if we needed to call her away from a bad situation.
In April 2022 after cutting her leg at the park and having to be taken away from us to get medical staples by unfamiliar masked people at the vet, due to COVID protocol, Belle began to become more fearful of new people approaching her. This mostly presented itself when being dropped off at daycare, so we enrolled her in a week long board and train program there in June 2022 where she did really well. Drop offs improved and belle was able to keep going to daycare without incident.
Since then, Belle has gone through a lot with us. In July 2022, our daughter was born prematurely and spent her first 100 days of life in the intensive care unit. We lived with Belle in a hotel for three months so we could be close to the hospital. Belle struggled with the busyness of the hotel and all of the new people constantly coming and going.
Once we were home again in October 2022, things came close to returning to normal, but then a series of scuffles at the dog park occurred, all with different dogs, where Belle was injured and the other dogs were not. At the time, Belle seemed to take it in stride. In retrospect, it affected her more than she let on. Belle is now more guarded and less tolerant to the point where we have stopped going to the dog park.
In paralell, Belle became increasingly vocal and protective of our home, which is a small townhouse. Barking at anyone; whether passing by or just sitting in their yard. This escalated to the point where she started charging our front storm door, so we stopped keeping the main door open. She even charged at a guest in the doorway, which led us to seek behavioral training with a specialist in 2023.
The behavioral training sessions went well in terms of controlling Belle when new people came into the house, but she was still very vocal in the backyard, to the point where we stopped letting her go outside in the fenced in yard alone.
Belle is generally a nervous dog. What we intiailly viewed as hyperactivity seems now to be an overreaction to anxiety and fear. After a long wait, Belle had an evaluation by a behaviorist at Penn Vet in February 2024. This helped us develop a plan to deal with her anxiety, which includes a daily dose of Reconcile.
We reached the sad conclusion, when she growled and snapped at our toddler's hand after we took a high value treat away from her, that our home is just not setting up Belle for success.
We love Belle dearly and hope that we can get her into the right forever home. We know that in the right environment, Belle will return to being the wonderful dog that she was until all of the chaos entered our lives.