Our dog Olive

I was walking the dog up Eliot Street earlier today when I passed a yard in which a middle-aged lady was standing with her little furry looks-like-an-ottoman dog. She looked up hopefully and asked, "Is your dog friendly?"
"No, she isn't," I said, adding, after seeing the lady's crestfallen look, "sorry."

Laura and I adopted Olive, our Lab/Pyrenees/Borzoi/Anatolian Shepherd/Etc mix, just over a year ago. One Sunday last January we were hanging out with Laura's sister and her husband. Us men were watching football while the ladies trawled petfinder.com. Occasionally one of them would turn the computer around to face her respective manfriend and say "Oooh, look at this one!" To which one of us would distractedly reply, "Oh yeah, nice." The following Saturday--six days later--the four of us found ourselves at a park-n-ride in New Hampshire with fifty other people waiting for the Puppy Bus.

The dogs the ladies had found on petfinder that day were being offered for adoption by an organization called Adopt-A-Lab. As we learned, Adopt-A-Lab is an interstate dog broker, connecting unwanted animals from America's fecund Heartland with (presumably barren) Northern Liberal Elite families. Olive came to us from a shelter in Cookeville, Tennessee. When I mentioned this to my father--a Nashville native--he made a face and said something like "Cookeville, that's real flavor country." Adopt-A-Lab's screening was rigorous. Want a dog? Got $400? Great, we'll put her on the Puppy Bus tomorrow.



The Puppy Bus turned out to be a modified livestock trailer pulled by a pickup containing three very large, very jovial, and very Southern men. They hopped out, the fifty or so of us waiting for our dogs hesitantly queued up at the trailer's side door, and puppies were shoved into trembling hands. Each person would approach the door, give the dog's name, and would without ceremony become the owner of a nervous, wriggly animal. Laura and I picked up Olive (nee Julie, nee Jewel, nee Cinderella), and the in-laws became the proud owners of Tonks (nee Bailey).



Olive is a wonderful dog... but. She's crazy, see? I mean, she loves us and all, and is able to eventually appreciate other people (given months of exposure), but she does not like strangers. In some circumstances she's great with other dogs, in some she will bring the whuppin'. She and I did doggy obedience class, we even had a consultation with a specialist (her assessment? "It's not that bad, and it will never be right"). It's pretty clear she was abused or traumatized in some way during her months in Cookeville--she'd apparently been rescued from the home of an animal hoarder who one day decided he/she had enough animals and started shooting them. So, we're happy to give her some leeway. And in the past year she has gotten much better--she's a happy dog. We love her dearly. But still, she crazy.

An abbreviated list of things that Olive is afraid of:

1. Flapping flags
2. Flags that are not flapping
3. Plastic bags
4. Batting practice
5. Rolling luggage
6. Buses (but not subway cars)
7. Crowds
8. People bending over to say hello
9. Anyone or anything that wants to be friends
   
10. Children
11. Noises
12. Objects