Through the past few decades, we’ve adopted many dogs from animal shelters. The dogs always become good members of our pack (nine dogs at present). Occasionally, we get a real surprise. My wife was at a German Shepherd rescue organization and saw a red male who had been found running loose several hundred miles away. A few phone calls later, the dog was on his way to our house to see how he’d get along with all the other four-legged people. He passed that test, basically ignoring everything except my wife. He would stay no more than two feet away from her. She named him “Tanner.” The next day, Tanner went to our vet. We learned that he weighed 48 pounds and needed some food and some recovery time. We also learned that at some time, Tanner had either chewed through a chain or chewed through some chain link fencing, based on the damage to his teeth. He settled in at his new home, and outside of an incident where he showed me just how useless a collar with a plastic latch really is (he just popped it off and decided to wander around a bit until my wife got home and retrieved him), he decided his spot was close to my wife. All the time.

I ordered a real collar, a heavy leash and a traffic lead from Ray Allen and attached a steel cable to our outside kennels so Tanner could go out but not be loose, which seemed to bother him not at all. If my wife were outside and decided to go in, Tanner would bolt across the yard toward her, meaning a steel cable was also moving along the ground at the same speed. My ability to jump over that cable was tested often. Knowing none of his history, I was always watching Tanner, trying to learn about him and perhaps gain some clues as to his past. I learned he could find hidden objects by scent. Using the traffic lead, he would walk right at my side. He barked very little, but when he did, he was barking about something that needed attention, like a strange vehicle in the driveway. Once, however, when we had four patrol cars in the driveway, Tanner merely glanced at them and sat down.

He also had the ability to launch from his back legs with no warning at all. He never did this to us, but he did to two people who, moments before, he had been casually sitting there watching. In one case, a man reached out to shake my wife’s hand. Instantly Tanner was six feet tall and all teeth. My wife popped the leash once and Tanner immediately went back to being a sitting statue. By this point, he’d reached just under 90 pounds and had a rather formidable appearance. He continues to stay close to my wife all the time.