Defying expectations: A senior dog surprises everyone
In which Jill admits to having misjudged a perfectly good boy.
You know how you see someone on TV and think: That person and I could be friends?
Don’t panic. I’m not a basement-dwelling cyberstalker. Au contraire, when I leaf through People magazine at the salon, I don’t know who half those people are. But I know that if I shared a cocktail with Megan Rapinoe, hopped in an airport Uber with Jon Stewart, or was stuck in an elevator with Stevie Nicks, we’d have a lot to talk about. I get them.
I feel the same way about Rocco, the dog we’ve had the longest of any dog in our rescue. I saw him week after week at the Downey shelter, alternately barking and smiling in his kennel, tail seesawing back and forth. This poor, 9 year-old staffie boy who’d been surrendered by his family was looking for someone to love. And to love him back. I got him.
When the shelter gave him the 72-hour notice, part of me was indignant. THAT goofy boy with the ear-to-ear grin, headed for the back room? What are they thinking? But part of me was excited, too, because I knew immediately that we would rescue Rocco and that I’d get to spend time with him.
The bad news is no one stepped up to foster Rocco. We put him at Best Friends, where he ended up spinning in his kennel. Then I got him into boarding, where he was happier but still barky, and sometimes even manic. Once, on a leash walk at boarding, Rocco recognized my car and—desperate to go home—furtively tried to jump in through the driver’s side window.
The good news is that I was right about Rocco. Recently, we found a temporary foster, and after a few days of decompression, he became a completely different dog. He relaxed. He slept soundly on the dog bed near his people, and lounged during the day by the pool. He was house-trained and content to do whatever the family was doing. He relished his neighborhood walks. When we picked Rocco up, the foster mom lamented that they would “miss his loving presence.”
Likewise, at my house (kept separate from our cranky dog, Pinky), he was polite, showed no separation anxiety or destructive behavior, slept soundly on his dog bed, and only ever barked when the neighbor’s dog barked first. Having walked him at the shelter and at the boarding facility, I was gobsmacked by his leash manners. I knew it, I thought. He’s a great dog after all!
Now that we know how compliant and happy Rocco can be in the right setting, I’m struggling to undo expectations I’ve set about him. “He’s a lot of dog,” I’d warn potential adopters. The trouble is, he’s NOT! He’s active and healthy for a 10 year old! He likes to participate, doesn’t sleep all day, is always up for a car ride, and generally defies people’s assumptions for what a senior dog should be.
And maybe he’s not even senior. Did you see that the world’s oldest Golden Retriever just celebrated her 20th birthday? Guess what? She was adopted as a senior at 14!
Having kept Rocco in boarding for longer than I should have, I’m now spending more time promoting him than I normally do for our dogs. I’ve let Rocco down. But I mean to make it up to him by finding him a perfect forever home with a family who loves him for the dog he is, not the dog they imagine he might be. It took a long time, but we know Rocco now. We GET him.
