Hi everyone,

I wanted to thank you all for your advice and give you an update on Thabo. It was rude of me not to follow up. It has been a challenging period on my life for both me and my partner these past few months and the additional stress of working with Thabo has kept us busy. We have not had a session with our trainer since the first one. She would like him muzzle trained first. We are doing so with a nylon muzzle right now.

About a month ago we reached out to our community for help. Thabo was getting out of control with his barking and aggression. We have done obedience classes with Lebowski our other dog and we continually practice basic obedience commands with Thabo but these measures have not been enough.

The first person we called was the SPCA where we adopted him. The women there plainly said if we returned Thabo to them based on the description of his behaviours they would put him down. The alternative no-kill adoption agency said they would not be able to help either. We are still unsure about whether or not we should be keeping him. I feel like most of the time we don't have the answers or the time to find them. He is getting good consistent care with us but we are really inexperienced in this matter and worried about making mistakes. We are also worried about how Thabo is affecting our lives. We are going away for a few weeks next March and regardless of how obedient Thabo is of us we don't know who we could ask to take him on during that time? We don't know anyone who we could trust to handle an aggressive dog.

We have had Thabo for almost five months now. The barking inside the house has subsided slightly as he settles in. For excercise we are starting to let him run off leash with his muzzle on a walk through the woods that people rarely frequent. Prior to this Thabo only got to really run in the fenced dog yard out front of our home but I think this was a mistake. Whether or not we are in the yard with Thabo, when someone or some dog walks by he he will charge over to the fence and growl and bark. Telling him no, putting him on his lead for awhile, bringing him inside, nothing we've tried stops this behaviour.

Again, thank you for all your input. I will definitely be posting again with more questions. I'm also going to put up some pictures of Thabo in the gallery. The trainer says he is probably a Basenji-Pit-Bull cross.

gonetothedogs