Reformed

This post is all about Maya, so it won’t be interesting to many of you. But although she weighs only 33 pounds, she’s a big part of our family and thus deserves some face time here on our family blog!

Maya has come such a long way. When we adopted her, she was a 1-3 year old stray dog who had never had a home. She was also VERY, VERY sick and nearly died just days after we picked her up; in fact, the emergency vet told us that if we hadn’t brought her in the morning that we did, she wouldn’t have made it through the day. I’ll spare you the graphic details of her condition and surgery. After several weeks of recovery, Maya transformed into the happiest, healthiest, and most well-mannered dog on the face of the planet (biased? nah.)

We always say that the reason she is so sweet and obedient is because she’s grateful. Or just happy to be alive. I’m OK with either.

The list of Maya’s positive attributes is long: she doesn’t bark, whine, lick, jump, beg, smell, scratch, or violate personal space…. and she loves all people and all dogs and has no health issues whatsoever. HOWEVER, she’s always had one awful flaw--- she runs away. Most of that is her husky nature, but a lot of it comes from the fact that she was a stray for so long. If a door is left open and she sneaks out of the house, she runs away and doesn’t come back. We’ve lost her multiple times, and twice we’ve lost her overnight. One of the hardest parts of searching for her is that we’ll sometimes spot her and she just looks like a stray again. She doesn’t respond to her name and she just paces around the streets like she doesn’t belong anywhere. It is heartbreaking. She eventually gets tired or thirsty, and she approaches someone in their yard who then gets our number off her tag and gives us a call.

All this to say, I am so very happy to report that Maya has finally quit running away! We’ve always said that time is all that she needs to break this awful habit, and I think we were right. We’ve trained her that she is no allowed to go out either door in our house without sitting first and then being invited out. It’s been two solid years of reinforcing this routine, and she’s now mastered it. She knows that she can’t just go out an open door, even if it blows open right in front of her. This has happened several times at our new house and we’ve walked in the room to find Maya sitting in front of a wide open door waiting for permission to go out. Even more impressive than that, our driveway gate has blown open several times and Maya has either stayed in the backyard on her own or has wandered into a neighbor’s yard but responded to her name and came right home when we called her. Just yesterday, Kolby was inside doing schoolwork and Maya was in the backyard when the gate blew open again. Maya apparently went next door and started playing with our neighbor and her two young children in their backyard. The neighbor simply called her name and Maya followed her back into our yard. Isn’t that the most normal dog thing ever? Get out, go play next door where the action is, willingly come home when you’re called. This is so huge for us! Maya is finally a “normal” dog who knows where she belongs and doesn’t feel compelled to dash away at the speed of light as soon as an opportunity presents itself. She has a sense of home now, which is very counter-intuitive for huskies.

We’re very proud of her and VERY relieved that the days of chasing a runaway dog are hopefully behind us (fingers crossed!).