Dog

I've always been used to having a zoo while growing up, so moving out was quite surreal. Leaving my hordes of pets (babies, as I like to call them). Naturally I had to get something to smother homesickness tears with. A puppy was the obvious first choice, quite an en devour for someone with no income...

So there he was, tiny and fragile, my baby. I can remember carrying him whenever I got the chance and sneaking him onto my bed with my parrot for a nap. I was in heaven, me and my 2 babies, sleeping.  With the help of my parents and partner in adventure (I hate the word 'boyfriend'), he grew.

He has the strangest mannerisms, he moans a lot, complains a lot and is very mouthy. With very mouthy I mean that he holds my hand when we walk around in the house and always needs something in his mouth. He looks you in the eye when you talk to him, wakes you up by putting his head on the bed and staring at you and he takes sides when my fellow adventurer and I play-fight. He is also particularly fond of slapping people with his paw.

We've started taking him to classes as we noticed that he has a nasty prey drive. The term 'prey' includes children, which is very, very bad. It'll rip me to shreads if he hurts a child. We went to class yesterday and while trying to get him to heel the 'teacher' lady started walking in circles around us. I was staring at her just as much as my dog was, trying to figure out what the heck this was all about. Seems quite obvious, but she was trying to get me to get his attention on me.

I do, and always have loved teaching my animals things. I even taught my goldfish to swim to specific colored hoops to be fed, but I'm intimidated by people when I think that they know more than I know. That's extremely naive, I know, but it's just the way I am. I'm afraid of failure. When I do fail, I don't take it well. Anyway, the next moment the teacher lady starts asking me why I'm so insecure and says that the dog wont look to me for leadership if I don't even believe in myself. That struck a pretty big nerve.

There I was,a 19 year old, crying. I tried to hold it back, but I've always been quite insecure and I hate it. I hate the way that I can't hide it and the way that no matter how hard I try, I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Mignon (the teacher lady) probably got a fright and threw her arm around me. She told me that it is hard, but it can be done. She meant this in the context of teaching my dog to heel, but I referred it back to the insecurity topic and cried even more.

My adventurer spoke to her and apparently she told him to take me home and pamper me. She felt guilty for making me cry, little does she know that it had nothing to do with the dog or with her.

Maybe these classes will teach me to be secure, be self confident. Maybe my fear of failure will force me to become more self confident for that sake of training my dog to actually listen to me. He'll be better than the other dogs, even the 100% german GSD that we have the class with.

My ticket to a more secure me.