Elton is Special

We adopted Elton when he was five months old. He was described to us as a dog that would crawl up into your heart if he could. That’s a great description of Elton and our hearts needed some mending. Paul and I had lost both two beloved dogs in eight months, Bernie to cancer, and Royal to a stroke.

I knew Australian Shepherds well as a breed and loved their intelligence and train-ability. Elton would be my seventh herding dog and fourth puppy that I had raised.

It was obvious that Elton had all the wonderful traits of an Aussie, but there were other things about Elton that we noticed early on. Specifically, Elton would startle at sudden environmental changes. If someone left the room, changed clothes and came back into the room, Elton would bark at as if the person was a stranger.

Elton had major impulse control issues. No, seriously, major. He wouldn’t just jump up on furniture or people. He would launch himself like a missile at anyone and anything and try to physically climb up the walls or jump entire flights of stairs. We really had to manage Elton to keep him from jumping on the dining room table or into the oven.

He especially could not control himself around our older dog George. He would grab onto George like a lampray. It made managing both dogs in the same space a larger and larger challenge.

And the chewing! Like nothing I had experienced in all my years as a dog owner and trainer. It was more like the chewing phase that beaver would go through.

Because of my experience as a professional dog trainer, I knew that these things were not all that unusual in a puppy, especially a puppy of Elton’s age. Every puppy goes through “fear periods” and behavioral difficulties during adolescence. So we amped up our training and socialization, enrolling in ongoing puppy classes and committing ourselves to helping Elton work through each issue.

Months went by and despite our best efforts, we couldn’t seem to work through these issues, no matter how hard we tried. I reached out to many friends and colleagues for advice and hired a professional IAABC behavioral consultant for more help. Elton seemed stuck in patterns of behavior of a very young puppy as he grew to nearly 70 pounds.

What we didn’t realize, but our trainer did, was there were some neurological aspects that we had yet to discover.