Socializing During The Apocalypse
A few weeks ago, on separate occasions, Japhy became reactive toward two male dogs in our neighborhood. Both dogs live right around the corner from us, and we see/pass them often on our walks. Japhy has never had issues with any other dogs we've encountered on our walks or in our travels, but for whatever reason he has suddenly deemed these two males the root of all Tech Terrace Evil. Because of his reaction to these two dogs, which is the same now every time we pass by them on our walks, I started to worry about Japhy's reputation around the neighborhood and whether I'd done enough to properly socialize him, hard as it has been to do so in these trying times. While he seems to get along with most every other dog he meets, given that his time with me has been overwhelmingly anti-social for obvious reasons (distemper, pandemic), I figured it would probably be a good idea to make more of an effort to get him with some other dogs to play, despite the current apocalypse...er, pandemic (Lubbock has seen a significant spike in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks). So I asked a friend who volunteers at the same local animal rescue where I make portraits of adoptable animals once a month if she thought maybe I could bring Japhy out to the shelter to meet some dogs and try to gauge what's going on with his social skills, if there's anything I need to be really concerned about. And my friend found The Best Dog for Japhy’s first play date there. Her name is Wednesday.
We met Wednesday on a Saturday morning (heh) and she and Japhy got along famously. My friend and I took them for a nice, albeit very warm (come on West Texas, it's autumn now, the cooler temps can stay!) walk together. Before long they were playing and just being ridiculously cute together. Japhy was a total goof. Wednesday is a pretty playful girl and was the instigator of most of the interactions on this particular visit, but Japhy certainly didn't mind at all and engaged with her quite willingly.
There were zero issues between Japhy and Wednesday, and I sort of expected that to be the case. Japhy is such a chill dude in just about every situation we've encountered so far. His reactive behavior toward the two male dogs is highly unusual. While chatting with my friend about Japhy's disdain for them, she suggested that perhaps the two males are intact. There is evidence that suggests that some neutered male dogs will act aggressively toward intact males because they feel threatened by them. Since then I have confirmed that at least one of the male dogs is indeed intact, so that's my current working theory.
But for sure, Japhy loves the girls. And the girls love him.
