Junk Yard Dog comes to visit

Darling Daughter came home for the holidays with both Prince Charming and her junkyard dog—all 15 feisty pounds of her—in tow. Junk Yard gets that moniker from her origins at the Pasadena animal shelter, where she showed up one day slathered in mud from the construction site where she had been found and may have lived a good part of her four-month lifespan. She’s pretty much wire-haired terrier through and through, with an overlay of beagle giving her a black saddle with white boots, vest, and taillight, all trimmed up with soft tan. She’s stocky, so in isolation she looks much larger than she is, and she typically makes up for size in volume.

Which is not terribly effective around the dogs that live with me the rest of the year. My own dog can be wonderfully sweet and affectionate, but those aren’t exactly the traits that earned her the position of Alpha Bitch next to the boxer/bird dog Tank that moved in with us just over a year ago. Alpha Bitch also seems to be part hobbit; she delights in snatching toys that Tank has dropped, dashing off to my bedroom, and “hiding” them on my bed. She doesn't take well to annoyances, and anything that irritates her is likely to get a tongue-lashing, quite likely accompanied by ugly snarls and growls and probably at least baring of teeth, if not some gratuitous snapping to seal the point. When she is asleep, even small movements can yank her to rowdy reprobation.

Tank is usually quite the opposite. He was starved for both food and affection when Second Son, who yo-yoed back home last year, found him at the local shelter. Affection is as important as food to Tank, who works hard to get both of them now. He would never dream of stealing a toy; in fact, he’d be more likely to offer one than to snatch it. In spite of his size (when he rises up on his hind legs, his face is inches from mine) and his energy, his current objective in life seems to be controlling his whiplash tail and eager paws enough to win the affection of our cat, who suffers through with Alpha Bitch but just isn’t too much into the enthusiastic Tank. Otherwise than intimidating the cat, he’s quite gentle and quiet and usually more than eager to please.

To get an idea of how these three stack up, imagine Junk Yard standing on my patio. Alpha Bitch can (and sometimes does) stand over her, her belly clearing Junk Yard’s back. Tank can stand over Alpha Bitch.

In the past, Junk Yard has enjoyed coming to our house. When Alpha Bitch was a puppy, Junk Yard buddied up to the cat and had a fine time playing with her, and Junk Yard had plenty of experience to keep her ahead of the pack. The next year she stood up on her hind legs to explain reality to Tank, and he obediently accepted her word as law. Now that the other two have had some time together and she’s the new kid on the block, they’re a lot less frightened by her purely terrier noisemaking, and she’s feeling a bit nonplussed about losing her status as queen of the castle.

That became painfully apparent when I had the three of them in the back yard yesterday afternoon to play fetch. Now, I had seen videos of Junk Yard playing fetch with an assortment of toys when she was fresh home from the shelter, and she had cheerfully brought back anything that was thrown for her. Not so much now; from what I hear now, she is happy to chase whatever is thrown for her, but  in her digs, humans may throw all of her toys for her to hide in various places not where they originated.

In the sandpit the bigger dogs have made of my backyard, she can give the others a good run for the ones that are farther away, although she typically doesn’t come up with the ball. That initially translated into her scrambling to snag any ball that landed close enough for her to get it and digging furiously in an effort to keep it away. Her industry is admirable but extraneous; the other two seem to have established long ago that He Who Gets the Ball Keeps the Ball, so the one who snags it has the privilege of taking it back.

I sort of thought that praise for the return of the ball would encourage Junk Yard to stop being so possessive, but that hasn’t worked; neither has grabbing her by the scruff and telling her no before prying it from her jaws. The best solution so far—when the other two are willing to break their code of honor to keep the ball in play—has been for Tank to distract Junk Yard long enough for Alpha Bitch to snag the ball when Junk Yard isn’t looking.

This morning the big dogs decided to honor the code, but Junk Yard caught onto the fact that if she tried to bury the ball, her Grammar was going to be upset. A couple of times she even got it onto the patio so I cold pry it out of her jaws and praise her for bringing it back. The next time she got that close, she took off into the house with it, so I closed the door and continued to play with the other two. I meant for shutting her out (or in) to be punishment, but she seemed thoroughly self-satisfied as she stomped off upstairs to report to her mother about how mean I was!

DD and PC have taken off for a couple of days, leaving Junk Yard to work out her differences with the other dogs and Grammar. We’ll see if she gets the hang of it over the next couple of weeks.