Some of you may know by now that George did not come home with us on Saturday. I am still struggling to understand exactly what went wrong. I don't think that The Dog's Trust can be entirely blamed for this, but by their own admission, the dog behaviour expert who came along on the dog walk, had never met George before. Nor, we think, did she have experience of how Boxers mix with other dogs; usually nose to nose, square on, and not nose to bottom. One Boxer person we know feels it is to do with their short noses and docked tail, but that's for another blog post.
The social mix went well. Off lead, the two dogs had equal energy. On lead, George exhibited significant frustration and aggression. We asked for him not to be muzzled. He didn't bite Brin, just made a lot of noise. To be honest, no worse than we've seen occasionally between Brin and Themba, when they got up each other's noses. We were therefore quite surprised and unhappy when told that we couldn't take George home in the same car as Brin. The dog behaviour person felt that they would fight in the car, and even if we did take him home, he would never a lot of behaviour training. We were told to go home and let them know before 4pm if we were coming back to fetch George. We sat in the car park for ages, debating what we should do. I suggested kidnapping George, he obviously isn't thriving in that environment. Mr B saw sense, so we brought Brin home, and decided that we couldn't put Brin or ourselves through all that again. No George for us.
To make matters worse, we had had to sit through a pre-adoption talk for over an hour, with the same 'expert', in a room of people taking puppies home, some of whom had never owned dogs before. There was no air, the chairs were uncomfortable, and the 'lecturer' sat in front of the door, effectively blocking the escape route and presenting very dominant behaviour. To say that I didn't take to her, is putting it mildly. Her delivery was loud and over-bearing, and not very useful to us at all. We were disappointed to see her with George for the walk/mix.
Anyway, we have decided that re-homing a rescue dog is not for us. We are not 'institutionalised' and I'm afraid I just can't get my head around all the rules. If we had been allowed to, we would have taken George at the first meeting and all will have been well in Shackleford by now. Good luck, lovely George. Hope you find a proper home soon.