The Rescued Pup

Cruz the Wonder Chi

Meet Cruz, our newest rescue. His pull request came to my inbox as urgent from a trusted networker. We saw his story and decided we needed to pull him since he is the type of dog we have great success with. In his shelter paperwork he is noted as fearful, hard to handle, possibly feral and an escape artist with a need to flee.

We pulled him Wednesday. Thursday he was socialized with our own personal dogs in one of our training rooms. It was uneventful. He didn’t want to interact with the dogs, he was a tiny bit interested in observing them and their interactions with me, but mostly he was searching for a way to escape.

Today was his first walk on a leash. The shelter notes said he was not able to be leashed so we knew even getting a leash on him was going to be progress. As usual, we decided that since getting the leash on was so easy and he didn’t seem too incredibly uncomfortable outside with us, we would add in some pack members.

We started our walk and most of the pack ignored him. He did not fight walking on the leash (probably because we used the look forward, move forward technique). We like to break our walks up into 2 sections. The first is everyone’s time to go potty and socialize, at about the halfway point, we always stop for pets and play and finally finish with a walk with some sort of purpose. This video was taken during half time. We are so proud of Cruz and his accomplishments in such a short amount of time!