Every so often I take in foster dogs from the local shelter. This is usually a win-win situation for all of us: giving a foster dog a temporary home allows them to calm down, settle and learn in a more stable environment than the shelter can afford to give them, enables me to assess, work with and train difficult dogs (which they usually are) in a domestic environment and provides Aramis with new playmates, advancing his social skills.
Only that this time, I had brought back Aramis’s vision of the devil incarnate: Raoul, a giant, intact male, six-month old, gangly, playful mastiff puppy. I knew that my dog would not be pleased and I was not wrong: Aramis hated him with a passion from the first minute. He wanted him gone as soon as he saw him and not matter how hard Raoul tried to convince Aramis that he was nice and meant no harm, Aramis would have loved to erase him from the face of the earth. Permanently, he convincingly assured both me and Raoul, leaving no traces. Yet, Raoul had not been coping particularly well with life in a shelter and desperately needed a bit of time away until a new home was found for him.
Allegedly, Raoul was one of the first dogs submitted to the shelter that had been bought during the first national lockdown due to Covid-19. Probably unaware of what raising and keeping a dog means, Raoul’s owners soon realised that they were no match for this big, strong dog. They brought him in claiming that he was aggressive, had bitten them on several occasions and had destroyed the house when they had tried to leave for work.
The dog I met was a giant, chunky, confused, but very friendly pup who had never learned that humans could be reliable, trustworthy, predictable and kind. He had never been introduced to boundaries (set by people or dogs, which drove Aramis mad with rage), had learned to use his strong, heavy body to push everything and everybody out of his way and had developed a fairly unhealthy habit of guarding his food by means of his beautiful, but impressive set of pristine white teeth.
While Aramis was plotting to remove him and bury his remains somewhere in the woods, Raoul and I became friends. Within a few days he had learned not to jump up, that people wanted to deliver rather than to steal his food and being left on one’s own for a moment was not so bad after all and could, as a matter of fact, be quite relaxing.
In typical mastiff fashion, Raoul is not a dog for making rash decisions. He observes and waits. Only then does he act, but woe betide anyone who dare get in his way in this moment. He was not, however, fundamentally opposed to amicable proposals suggesting an alternative course of action so long as they were brought to his attention early enough in the decision-making process.
It soon became clear that somebody knowledgeable of this type of dog would be able to guide him in the right direction and offer him a suitable home. At six months old, however, he was still very young and puberty, the age at which he might seriously think about challenging set rules for the first time would only come in a couple of months. Mastiffs are notoriously late bloomers and he will only hit maturity at 3 or 4 years old. If by then the people responsible for him have failed to introduce him to the world he will be expected to live in and have not been able to provide him with the guidelines necessary to live in peaceful co-existence with everybody around him, he may become a nuisance or even a danger both to himself and his environment.
After his time at our place, I am very happy to say that Raoul has found his forever home. He now lives with a very knowledgeable colleague, a fellow dog trainer and pet sitter, in the company of another Cane Corso and a whole bunch of clients’ dogs with whom he gets along very well indeed.
I do not doubt that Raoul will grow into a very well-behaved, friendly dog who will excel at his new hobby, which is mantrailing, i.e. following a particular individual’s scent over great distance.
The Adventures of Aramis 