A Quiet Gentle Dog

A quiet gentle dog had been left abandoned in a kennel.

She was scared. She knew that she had been abandoned; familiar faces had been replaced with strange ones: indifferent, impatient, annoyed. She was not wanted. She worried from day to day that she would not be fed. She was afraid at night of strange noises in the darkness. The days passed in dreary boredom. People who didn't care about her made short business-like trips past her kennel.

Then one day a large man entered her fenced yard. He did not speak to her or smile. He stood with his arms held out from his sides to make his already massive shape appear wider. She rushed frantically back and forth along the fence, barking.

Behind him, outside the fence, strangers watched the man stalk her, shifting his ground, blocking her in, herding her toward a corner. She didn't know what the big man wanted, but he did not seem friendly.  She dodged about in panic, broke past the man, and ran into the side kennel adjacent to her fenced yard.

That was a mistake; now she was trapped.

The big man followed her. He was as wide as a wall and loomed over her. When she tried to dodge around him, he shifted his weight, blocking her escape. Fight or flight? She couldn’t flee and didn’t have any fight in her. Jinx hunched her back and dropped her tail, submitting herself to his mercy.

A hand the size of a frying pan swung toward her face.  Jinx cowered, but all he did was snap a leash on to her collar. He was going to take her away.  A small hope flickered in her heart; maybe she would be taken to a better place. She had been living alone in the enclosure for a long time, miserably cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and always lonely.  She trotted along beside the man, away from the enclosure, off to his truck.

 She didn’t know that a video of her “capture” was going to be used by a charlatan to promote himself as an expert in dealing with difficult dogs. She didn’t know that she had been labeled a biter. She didn’t know that she was going to be incarcerated in a dark filthy warehouse, trapped in a travel crate for years.

The man was Steve Markwell of the Olympic Animal Sanctuary and he had been contacted about a Jindo dog abandoned at a kennel. He used the opportunity of “rescuing” Jinx to have a video made of his self-proclaimed skill at “capturing” frightened dogs with bite histories. Here’s the video entitled "Low Stress Rescue in a High Stress Environment". The video is intended to be instructional; supposedly it is a demonstration of how to capture, without causing undo stress, a frightened dog that might bite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP6yPnlSPiE

Of course, anyone one watching this video can see that Jinx was badly frightened by Markwell, but could have easily been leashed up by any friendly person who refrained from intimidating her.

Here’s Jinx in the Olympic Animal Sanctuary:

Jinx is the dog in the bottom crate. She arrived at OAS in 2011, and was liberated about two years later. During those tow years she lived in an environment of enormous stress: noise, confusion, hunger, aggression. She was not spayed and was confined near unneutered male dogs.

But Jinx survived all of that--abandonment, exploitation, incarceration—as a gentle, quiet dog. She has forgotten that long ago leash training, but is learning new skills in her foster home. One of those skills is the art of lounging gracefully on the carpet! For a dog that has never experienced normal happy family life, she is doing very well!

Jinx is available for adoption and will soon go to a good home. Her story is testimony to the resilience of innate personality: No matter what bad experiences life dealt her, Jinx remained a  sweet dog. And now she is safe and ready to be loved.

 

 Keep smiling, Jinx! Life is only going to get better from now on!http://twodogfarms.com/Adoptable_Jindos.php