⚙ Lupen ⚙ wrote:How isn't it fair? I.. Don't get it?
It doesn't make the dog bad. It doesn't mean the dog can't make a great companion.
But it is not a good example of the breed. There are good examples and bad examples. Dogs who act like the breed was meant to act and those who don't.
Breeders bred dogs over hundreds of years for a reason. To get an outcome that, generation after generation, for the most part, breeds true. True in looks. Health. Temperament.
This really is futile though and I don't get why I keep responding. The problem can't lie with me. It can't just be the way I word things that make it so hard to grasp, because many have told you the same.
Lupen, you summed it up really really well.
Fuzzy, let me phrase it this way as well. My Skoll was a good dog. No, seriously, he was. Anyone who has heard me talk about him at length knows how much I loved, still love, that boy and how pained I was to make the choice I made with him. He was awesome. A total goober, with this spark in his eye and a love to learn. He loved me with his whole heart and I was blessed with every day I got to spend with him. He made so many things fun, even the hard stuff. He made me laugh when I was sad. He even helped me to walk and run on my own again after a very serious traffic accident I'd been in a few months prior to getting him. When it was just me and him, he was every bit what I love about the breed. Every day I woke up to his wigglebutt and his kisses and every night we would relax with him crawled entirely onto my lap while my roommate and I watched a movie together. He was my entire life for the short couple months that I had him. With just our interactions, he was every bit of a model doberman.
I had to put him to sleep because he was completely untrustworthy with other people and I could not risk him biting someone. That is not what a doberman is supposed to be, but it is a sad truth that happens occasionally due to bad breeding or bad training, or just sometimes a well bred dog with their wires crossed wrong (as evidenced by a few dogs from fantastic breeders in fantastic homes has showed me). It's something experienced doberman people have had a brush with and it's something that I sought the advice of experienced doberman people to figure out how best to proceed forward.
And you know, that choice killed me. It did. There are many times when I second guessed myself over the past year that he has been gone. Heck, just yesterday I was talking to Cardinal and Sara about him, and ended up needing to sign off for a little while so that I could get myself to stop crying. Do you know why?
Because he was a good dog. Because it wasn't fair, because he was such a good dog. Because if I could have him in a home that is completely way way out of the city and JUST me there, I would have been able to give him more chances. Because I had to value the lives and safety of the people around me over the value of my beloved friend. Sometimes I dream that I still have him and I always cry when I wake up and I don't see him because it means I have to remember losing him all over again.
Acknowledging your dog has problems does not mean they are not good dogs. It does not mean that they can't be good companions. Even the most badly bred badly trained viciously abused dogs can be good dogs. Skoll was a fantastic dog and it angers me to know that he will never be seen as that by anyone else. There are well bred, well raised doberman that have behaved like Skoll. It's an acknowledged problem within the breed. But I guess it's because folks like us have dealt with the extreme ends of this sort of thing, taken on dogs that no one else would want, made a commitment to these dogs... and we see people saying "it's all how their raised" or "you only say that because your dogs are bad dogs" or anything similar, and we try to reach out and say no, that's not always how it works.
When she discovered there were squeakers in it, she tested each section to see what was in it and was super excited when they squeaked. She also likes the octopus, it's got a grunting sound thing in it, and when she bit it she paused like "What the heck was that?" and then kept trying to make the sound over and over again. (That toy's staying in the living room, it'd be scary to hear that creepy sound in the middle of the night) 
