Why did I get Bud? Why did I want him? What was his purpose in coming to me?

As I’ve written, dogs are spirit animals, some more than others, I believe they come and enter our lives for a purpose, they come when they are needed, they leave when they are done.

Dogs mark the passages of our lives, if we are thoughtful and open, they make us better people, they teach us how to listen, they promote patience, they demand that we be less frustrated and impatient, and those can be lessons we carry over to the rest of our loves, to people and meaning.

This is why we love them so much, because consciously or not, we sense how important they can be to us, how connected we are to animals, how much we need them, just as they need us.

Why did this strange dog come to me, via the emotional and complex rescue pathway? Why did I get a dog so different from all my other dogs? He’s new still, so many things yet to see and learn.

Bud challenged my ideas about dogs, about training and communicating.

He has forced me to step out of myself and renew my vows to communicating clearly, to listening, to slowing down, to accepting his very different and untamed ways. Slowly but relentlessly, his purpose in coming her is revealing itself.

My dogs are almost always puppies, raised from birth and taught to blend into my life.

Bud is like a rocket who landed in our midst and explodes every day. Boundless energy, no training, brimming with instinct, disruptive untrained, loving and loyal.

Two dogs really, one a wild animal, running amok, marking, chewing, stealing.

The other, a complete love bug, a cuddler, a dog who will curl up on my stomach when I rest and share heartbeats with me.

He tests my spirituality and sense of self.  His presence is emotional in the way animal rescue can bind us to them in very deep ways.

I can either yell at him all day to stop chewing on shoes, humping Red, chasing chickens and cats, tormenting donkeys and eating every revolting thing a farm can offer.

Every time I stop yelling and start training and visualizing and thinking and training is a growth for me, a step forward, proof that dots make us better if we are self-aware.

It is never their fault, it is always our failure: to listen, to learn, to wait, to think. Last night, I set up a new crate for Bud, his old one was too small and it the gate broke.

I told him to go into the crate, a command he knows, and he looked at the crate and balked. He was terrified, and refused to go in. I started to grab him by the collar and drag him, and shook my head and said out loud “what the hell are you doing?”

And I stopped and waited an hour and then got some of his favorite treats. I threw one into the crate. He balked and backed away. I left the room. When I came back later, he was chewing the treat, it was out of the crate.

I’ve tossed a dozen treats in there since and we also put his food bowl in there in the morning. There are few things on this earth Bud loves more than his food bowl, and he went in eagerly (I left the crate door open) and he rushed  in and ate  his food.

I’ll do this for the next four or five days until he rushes into this crate just as he does his other crate. It just took some thought and patience. Dogs don’t do what we wish just because we want them to. We need to see it through our eyes.

It feels so much better to help him love his crate and see it as a safe and nourishing place than it did to try to drag him in there. Having Red has spoiled me, I sometimes forget that all dogs are not like him.

Bud is learning to trust me,  and this was hard work and took a long time. I violated this trust by trying to drag him. I only did it once, it was chilling to me.  How simple to destroy that trust. How easy to slip into old and embedded ways.

But Bud is as forgiving as he is arousable. Trust and love are so much better than shouting and anger, all around.

What a metaphor. So this is why Bud has come. To reinforce old lessons and teach me new ones. To help me grow and learn and change. To enhance and deepen my spiritual life.

To have a better dog,  you do have to be a better human. In the final analysis, there is just no way around it.