perry

Perry has been part of the household since I guess late October. I have tried to do everything right, and a lot of the work has paid off. He can almost always be trusted, for instance, to sit around in a room by himself and not wreck the joint. He goes to bed after 9 essentially voluntarily (I mean, he needs treats to make it happen but he understands the routine). He doesn't piss or shit inside (at least not inside this house, he still has some way to go in understanding/caring about the difference between inside this house and the insides of other buildings, though he's almost always OK with it). But I am somewhat worried about some of his behaviours, which I'm going to detail here mainly for my own benefit so I can refer again in a month or two.

One is, I can't quite tell what he thinks of me. I know that sounds stupid but I observe him, for instance, greeting people he knows, and he's always really pleased to see them; overjoyed, sometimes. He is also, often, incredibly happy to meet new people, though he's dialled this down a little in the last couple of months. But when he gets up in the morning (aka I let him out of his cage) I might get a tail wag, but I certainly don't get the rapturous response many others receive. 

Now seriously I don't want a sycophantic dog, I know I hold a special status in his life if only because on the rare occasions in the dog park when he gets a fright or is nipped, whatever, he comes running to me instantly. But I have also noticed, for instance, that when I call him he knows what I want, but he won't come all the way - he comes close and sits down far enough away that I would have to get up to reach him. Similarly, we have mixed experiences at dinner time - when I'm putting his bowl down, I always make him sit and wait before I give him the go ahead to eat, and sometimes this can get confused, with him opting to go elsewhere - only temporarily, because he likes eating dinner, but he does find it fraught.

To be honest, I do wonder sometimes whether I have some odd ambiguity for him because another man, before I came along, was somehow a psychological problem for him. I can't imagine, knowing what I know about his earliest months, how this could be but everything else seems to fit. It is like he thinks I am likely to become needlessly authoritarian, even aggressive, at some point. (The coming to me in the park in times of trauma are an exception obviously). 

I might just be projecting. As I said, I never wanted a sycophantic pet (in truth one of the reasons I got Helmi was to take Nancy's attentions off me at least a little, which has happened, not in a positive way for Nancy I would say) and I'm not per se dissatisfied on that front, I'm just wondering if there's an impediment here that I can't quite penetrate. 

There are more issues but I'm sick atm and I can't concentrate well rn. 

* Update 25 March:

I was listening to a podcast which quoted (!) Meet the Fockers (! lol) with a fairly common sentiment about dogs vs cats, the eternal debate, in which dogs were dismissed as overly dependent and submissive whereas cats were/are more self-contained. Putting aside that my own cats are ridiculously sycophantic to me, I would say this is where Perry is more in the cat column than the dog column: he has always had his own opinions, as long as I've known him, and if he's going to change them he needs to be shown why. I appreciate that. 

But even this morning in the dog park in between tussling with other dogs he and I had a few good moments of connection. I'm not 100% putting the possibility that someone or something has hurt him off the table, because he does, as mentioned above, sometimes react in ways I've seen mistreated dogs react. Never snappy or lashing out though, so maybe it's my imagination. Maybe he just needs to be fully convinced.