Suicide Attempt #1

After a few weeks of being too terrified to react to anything, Mitzi started reacting to everything. When we walked by other dogs, her eyes would go crazy, she would lunge and jump at them and bark her head off. Sometimes I would try to explain that she was a rescue and still adjusting, other times I would just get the french toast out of there. Talking to strangers is hard, talking to them when you have the Hound of Hell seemingly trying to kill their dog is slightly harder. It was a complete front though, she is totally harmless. She was really saying: 'Don't come near meeee!!! But if you do I will totally run away! My barks are meaningless. MEANINGLESS!'. I found out later this is common in fearful dogs, at the time, I knew nothing. Actually, I knew one thing, in Greece she played happily with other dogs but that was in a large, open space. Look at her up there with her Greek pals, she's like 'hey, buds, let's fucking party!!!. My solution was to take her to an off-leash dog park. What a fool I was.

I picked a nice, big one close to my house, down at the lake. It was full of trees, squirrels and usually not too many dogs. Perfect. Nope, opposite of perfect.

At first she just kind of ran away barking from every dog that approached her but I thought 'good, she's getting exercise'. And really, she didn't seem THAT scared. It turns out my eyes didn't really know total dog fear when they saw it. A fellow dog owner came up to me and asked 'new dog'. I said 'yes' but I was thinking 'YOU DON'T KNOW ME!'. Anyhoo we chatted for a bit and then I saw him start to run like a maniac. Mitzi was trying to jump the fence out of the dog park. One thing though, the spot she was trying to jump led to a 10 foot drop, right into Lake Ontario. By the time I started running she was at the top of the fence a mere second from plummeting to her (possible) death. Fellow dog owner got there just in time and grabbed her for me. I felt so guilty. I had pushed her too hard. She needed more time. Also, she pooed her pants. But I could not blame her for that.