You’re probably aware I’ve been doing some fundraising to help my mom and myself, or Kat & Wolff, get to Spring Mysteries Festival this year.
Well, mom can’t come anymore. It’s just going to be me. (I could still use any financial help y’all are willing to give, however. I just barely made my registration cost.)
Why?
Aside from the obvious money issues, and the issue of my car not being fixed yet (and the fact it will cost 400 or so dollars to do so, not to mention renewing insurance on it), Wolff can’t go because of this beautiful monstrosity:
Lord Tyee Houdini-Wolf, the Awful Pawful. Occasionally also known as Col. Ty, because mom and I are big fat Battlestar Galactica geeks. (Our last dog was known as Major Adama.)
Tyee is sweet, thoughtful, caring, careful, loving, affectionate, playful, and a complete fucking terror. He also has major abandonment issues.
He’s a wolf-shepherd and he’s a rescue. Those things don’t combine very well — neither the breeding of wolf and shepherd by macho men who want a “tough guard dog”, nor the combining of said hybrid with a past that contained neglect and, quite likely, abuse. Wolff has had to work very hard with Tyee to get him to be as well-behaved as he is now.
He likes to jump on peoples’ shoulders still, but we’ve got him to a point where he’ll do it on command instead of whenever he damn well pleases. We’ve also taught him that he’s not to howl at sirens while he’s in the apartment — trust me, that was not easy! Sirens go by here every few hours, and we’ve never had a wolf dog who wouldn’t let out a song with such invitation. But he’s very smart, and figures out what we want soon enough.
Of course he still has his bad days. That’s to be expected. And we can’t fully trust him around kids — simply because we don’t know enough about what happened in his past, and he still has some behavioral issues that may be related to the mixture of wolf and shepherd more than how he was treated. (Seriously, folks, only ever breed wolf with husky. Anything else is just a really fucking bad idea.) This is not to say that he’s dangerous — he’s not. He just seems to have issues with younger mammals: he needs to tell them off. Combine that with a kid who doesn’t know how to treat dogs with respect, and we’ve got a recipe for the city putting down our ~*~dangerous~*~ wolf-dog. [insert rant about breed-specific legislation and stupid human attitudes towards wolves here]
Because of Tyee’s abandonment issues, whenever mom and I need to travel somewhere we need to leave him with people he’s already accustomed to — a secondary wolf pack. It takes time and effort to build up that sort of trust and rapport, and we had a place we could leave him — a boarder who had several other dogs and a lot of room for Tyee to run and play and frolic.
The plan was, we thought, to leave Tyee with this secondary pack when mom and I went down to Spring Mysteries Fest. He loves his pack so much that he barely notices us leaving: bye, Mom! Gonna go play! He bounds off, excited to spend time with his friends again.
Except that’s not happening. Tyee’s not going to his boarder — not this time, not, apparently, ever again. He was dumped.
Reasoning? No clue. Something about Tyee “not being safe” anymore. The boarder states we’ve been told all the details, but there’s obviously something missing — because the details don’t add up to our dog being classified as dangerous.
And here, you see, are the dangers of having a wolf-dog in your life. They are amazing and they will take up a massive portion of your heart, until your heart must grow to contain all the love you feel for such a wondrous creature who chooses to let you share your life with him. They are messengers of the Goddess Silva, lady of the True Woods, Queen of the Deep Furs, here to teach us back to our true selves. If ever you get to spend any part of your life with a wolf-dog, consider yourself extremely lucky.
But if you are to share your life with a wolf dog, you must be prepared to give up a large portion of your time. They are high-maintenance. They require the attention of a pack-mate — not an owner. You never own a wolf-dog; do not ever convince yourself otherwise. They need to have their place in the pack, and have it secure. And if you need to travel, you need to find someone to take care of them who is also like a pack-mate — abandonment issues or not (though, obviously, this is doubly important in cases like Tyee’s).
And if you lose that person right before you have to travel on a trip that was planned for months? Then you lose your ability to travel.
So, mom will not be coming along to Spring Mysteries Fest this year. She will be staying home with Tyee. And we will be spending the next months trying to find someone new to take care of him during our absences — someone who won’t dump him with no warning.
-Kat
