Success Stories - Bertha
My name is Dan Erhard, and I am one of the SCBC foster homes. Normally we call success getting a foster dog a new home so we can have room for other foster dogs. Ladybird has redefined my idea of a successful foster (the picture shows my pack, plus one foster dog. Bertha is the red hound in the center.)
She came to my house with history that would usually disqualify her as a dog SCBC would accept. Her owners were desperate, and determined to find and alternative to having her put to sleep. Ladybird had been to the local shelter twice, and had, along with another large dog, killed another dog at her second home. Within weeks of adoption by her third home, she was fighting any dog she saw and had racked up big vet bills to stitch her nose back together. So Ladybird, now renamed Bertha, came to my home for training so the owners could keep her. Fate stepped in at this point and Berthas owner finds she is soon to be blessed with a child, and suddenly a big dog seems like a bad idea. At this point it only seemed logical to have SCBC accept her as a foster, especially since Bertha has turned out to be very much trainable. Bertha became a part of my pack, and fairly soon the alpha dog of the pack. Her rehabilitation went surprisingly smooth, and she became very much able to welcome the new foster dogs without picking any fights. She is still a tough dog though, and if a dog attacks her, she is always ready to defend herself. At play with the pack, she will often be at the bottom of the pile, with three or four dogs all on one side and her on the other. She loves it.
Over the next year everybody who thought about adopting her refused after hearing her history. Who wants a dog that has killed? Nobody. So I was thinking, oh well, I'm stuck with this dog now. But then I began to notice something. Bertha is starting to train my dogs. She is making sure the rules that she has to live with are obeyed by every dog in the pack. Before long I am realizing that I can no longer do without her help. The dogs I foster are almost always the too aggressive, about to be euthanized dogs that most foster homes want no part of. They need too much training, and take too long to find a home for. But I like the challenge, and have the experience to do rehabilitation. And now I have a valuable assistant to help with the training. Bertha is making it possible for me to handle more dogs than I thought I could train at one time. She is allowing me to save the lives of dogs that there wouldn't have been room for before. Far from being stuck with her, I couldn't do without her. On the anniversary of her arrival, my wife and I formally adopted Bertha, the psycho dog nobody would take. Thanks to her, and her third owners decision not to euthanize, Bertha is now a rescue therapy dog and will save the lives of many other hounds.
Dan Erhard and pack, Las Cruces, NM
