As I have said before, walking a dog is not optional; they need to be walked every single day. Living where we do there are not a lot of great places to walk, no sidewalks, no walking trails, just the side of the road. So that is where we walk every morning. One of the things I like about Rottweilers is that they are not high energy dogs and don't therefore require a huge amount of exercise. We normally walk about a half hour a day except on the hottest days of summer when we might cut that back to 20 minutes.
So one of our neighbors had seen me walking the dogs about 4 years ago and was really impressed. I had Zeus at that time and and he had seen me walking Zeus and Lisa together prior to that. So the next thing I know I see this guy playing with 2 little Rottweiler puppies. This guy (I will call him Fernando) lives nearby but speaks no English so we had never had much of a conversation since I speak very little Spanish. As the months went by the dogs grew and grew and since Fernando knew nothing of dog training or discipline, there started to be problems in the neighborhood. He would let them out to pee early in the morning and they began to take advantage of those opportunities to wander a bit. The dogs must have been about a year old by then and were getting pretty big. The first news I heard was from a neighbor who said that someone had been bitten by one of them. Then there was another report of one of them getting into a fight with someone else's dog. One day I was talking to a friend of Fernando and he told me he was afraid of the dogs, who were becoming more and more aggressive. Fernando was a young bachelor and had a nice little house with nice furniture and a big screen TV and apparently the dogs had chewed it all up and chewed through the floor of the house. Because Fernando was now afraid they would get in trouble he had also been letting them out less and less and as a result they had started defecating in the house, which was quickly becoming unlivable.
About this same time Fernando's friend moved to a new house and rented Fernando his old house. When Fernando moved into it he tried bringing the dogs along and putting them in a dog run he had built for them outside but they were having none of that and cried all night long keeping Fernando awake. After a few nights of that he took them back to their old house and that is where they have lived ever since, by themselves. He pays rent on both places and comes by each day to feed them but spends very little time with them. I have told Fernando's friend many times that I would be willing to help train the dogs so that they could come and live with Fernando but he never accepted my offer. So they have been living there by themselves now for nearly 3 years.
Now Fernando is getting married and his wife has told him the dogs must go. Fernando's friend came to me for advice. So I decided that the first thing that needed to be done was an evaluation to determine whether they are even salvageable; aggressive middle-aged Rottweilers are not very adoptable. This morning Fernando and I walked the dogs on leash for about a half hour; they had never been on a leash before. The one I walked was the submissive one of the pair and she became very anxious when separated from the other one by more than a few feet. Neither of them seemed very aggressive and that was a good sign. As expected, they were both filthy (I doubt either has had a bath in years) and their nails , having never been trimmed, must be 2 inches long. One was missing large patches of fur and I suspected mange. The walk went well and I was thinking that they might be quite trainable. I told Fernando through a translator that before we put a lot of effort into training we must first take them to the vet as I am quite concerned about their overall health. An appointment has been made for next week. In the meantime we will be walking the 2 of them each morning, getting them some exercise and getting them used to walking on a leash.
I am forever amazed at how short sighted people are. They view dogs and other pets as objects to be bought and then discarded when the newness wears off. These are not objects, they are beings, and as such they come with the responsibility to tend to them until death does them part. These 2 dogs deserve better than they have gotten.
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