Unmeasured Responses

Losing a dog fight

I've been sitting on this post since September, not quite sure how to say what needs to be said here. In fact, it's been keeping me away from the blog.

On Thursday (9/25/2012), Trevor decided that he was tired of Tater getting attention. He decided he would screw with Tater by stealing his (empty) dog bowl. Tater didn't back down. What started as a testing incident escalated into a fight where Trevor did his best to kill Tater, and failed only by the grace of doG. Both of Tater's ears were mauled. The right one needed reconstruction. Tater was lucky not to lose his right eye, and there are injuries close to Tater's jugular. Trevor was definitely playing for keeps here.

I screwed up. There were signs of escalation that I didn't process correctly. The consequences of my blindness fell on Tater.

Two weeks later, matters got worse. After some fairly serious surgery Tater was starting to heal, and Trevor went after him again. The picture above is pretty bad. The second time was much worse. The question, then, is "what do you do?"

Trevor had a history of mishandling before he came to us, and had possessiveness issues as a result. For a long time that was the extent of it, but over the last year he has become progressively more willing to issue warning growls, notably to my son. Taken in that context, his behavior toward Tater has to be viewed as multi-vector aggression.

After talking to a number of friends in rescue, all of whom said the same thing, we made the decision to put Trevor down in early October.