I love my dog, he is my best friend. When I am at work I get sad that I have to be away from him. I have started to look at ways I can change my life style so that I can spend all day with him. It is amazing how fast my life changed because of my dog.

When we got him he was 8 weeks old and 9 pounds. He is a Mutt, no clue what breed he is, they say his momma was a Chow, but I don’t see it. When we got him, my wife and I were not looking to get a dog. My grandfather had just died, we were about to leave for California to go to the funeral in 5 days, her uncle and aunt was in town, it was a bad time for a dog. I, even though I did not see it, was a mess because of the death of my grandfather. I pretended to hold it together, but it was a lie, even I did not know the truth.

Well like I mentioned, my wive’s family was in town for a fundraiser for a charity set up in my late brother-in-law’s name. So now both of us were emotional. The event had just finished the night before, my wife un-easy because the future of the charity was in question, me uneasy because the man who taught me to be a man had died with me watching two weeks earlier. We were supposed to meet her family after lunch about 45 min away. Just after we get in the car, they call and ask if we can push back the meet up a couple of hours. Us not wanting to turn around decided to stop my the humane society.

This was not abnormal we had been going by to look at the dogs for weeks, it was a good way to relax. But the combination of the emotional stress and how great this dog was, well, we broke.

Let me explain how we meet Coppola. We usually would start by going into the puppy cage and look at what they had. It usually did not last long because the puppies are so loud that you would go nuts to stay very long. But when we went that day we saw a puppy that was sleeping. It was so loud you could not think, yet this dog was asleep. We had to play with him. When we got him he hopped like a rabbit, which was too cute.
So we paid the 110, which we did not really have, and asked then to hold him till the next day. We spent the rest of that day freaking out and downloading ever book on raising a puppy we could find. The first week was hell. We had no sleep, we cried every night as we saw our freedom disappear, but slowly we started to love him. We took him to puppy classes, we bought him every toy we could, we started feeding him an extensive raw food diet that makes us look crazy at the store (can I have some heart and lungs sounds weird when you say it out loud).

That is why this is so upsetting,  he wanted to kill me. I had gotten him a goat head for him to eat while I was mowing the lawn. The head was WAY more food then he needed, and I figured that he would eat till he was full, then I would save the rest for the next day. But after mowing for about 2 hours he was still eating, and having a hard time with it, I thought I would help him by breaking the jaw of the goat do he could eat the tongue (gross right?). When I walked up to him he tried to put the whole thing in his mouth, he does that with all his food so I did not think much of it, but when he could not hide it all in his mouth, he growled at me.

i was floored, I was bewildered, I was a little upset. I reached in to just get the meat from him he turn towards me and started barking! I have never heard this dog bark at anything let alone bark at the one he loves, the one who loves him. As I kept reaching in, he barked more and started lunging like he was going to bite me if I tried to get too close. At this I burned, my anger at him was high. I came up from behind him and grabbed him by the muzzle so that he could not bite me, then I grabbed the meat with the other hand. He was freaking out. at this point I did not know what to do, I almost literally had a wolf by the ears as it were. I could not let him go cause he would bite, and with his new adult teeth he could do some damage. I am angry, I am sad, I am overwhelmed by emotion as the sweet puppy that I loved since he was barely big enough to walk was now trying to escape my grasp so that he could kill me in defense of a piece of meat that I had given him. It was truly terrible.

Just then a light came, Coppola went from angry fight to scared helpless whine and looked up at me, begging me to help him (which is weird because it was me that was holing him). At that I let go of his muzzle and let go of the meat. I continued to hold him down on his back, pinning him down as dogs do when they dominate another dog. I held him there until I felt comfortable picking up the meat with him there and not feel that he would attack me. I then picked up the head, pulled it apart, and dropped it back down, and he went right away to trying to scarf it down.

after a while I went to pick it up for the day and he did a little growl, I looked at him, touched his neck and made sure he knew I was planing on pinning him again if he got in my way. he backed down pretty quick and I took the head. you could see in his eyes he wanted to do something about it, but for the moment I had won.

I realized a few things from this experiance:

1) God and Parents have a crappy job, cause who ever you raise will eventually try and strike back at you when they forget were they got what they where given.

2) Once something you raise strikes out at you, it is hard to go back.

It is about a month later now,  the other half of that goat’s head is still in my freezer, waiting for me to feel like he is ready to eat like that again, when I will be ready to deal with that emotion again. He and I get along better then I thought we would, but I still watch him, I don’t let him get away with as much when we are together, and I don’t take my eye off him. but I love him, and he loves me, and I think that is what really matters.