Now, we do this with all of our new dogs as a precaution, although we’ve never had another dog as challenging as he was. A month into our little exercises and he woke up like a ray of sunshine. Third, waking up begins to be a pleasant thing. Second, he wakes up and, what do you know, treats just fell out of the sky. First, you are too far away for the dog to snap at you. It accomplishes several things at the same time. Her advice was to take some treats or some of his food, sit on the couch some distance away from where he was sleeping and toss them onto him while he was sleeping. There are things that wake them up long before anyone puts a hand on them. On the track and in the kennels, they have their own space. She explained that Greyhounds are a lot different from other dogs in that they don’t have to deal with being startled awake until they’re adopted into a home.
We asked her about Hawk and his aggression when startled awake. Kathleen Gilley, of the famous Dancing Gilley Girls, came to our adoption group’s annual reunion picnic and was answering questions from the audience. However, at that crossroads, in the very beginning when we had the issue of a sleeping giant in our house who woke up angry and unpredictable, I was very lucky to get some amazing advice that was so simple, practical and helpful, that I feel it would be wrong of me not to share it.
I knew that a Greyhound returned for biting was going to face a very tough road to adoption and we decided to try to work things out with him rather than sending him back. Taleteller would have driven him back to the adoption kennel that night, but we were three weeks into Hawk’s adoption and our other Greyhound adored him. Fortunately, I instinctively leaned back at just the right time and he bit my arm instead of my face. He liked being brushed, but he had no experience being woken up by someone touching him. In our case, Hawk fell asleep while I was brushing him. Biting Greyhounds are not typical of the breed, but any dog can bite under the wrong circumstances.
The difference was that I was the person bitten and the dog was our second Greyhound. This is partly due to the fact that at one point, I was in her shoes. I know their family is facing some tough choices and I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. Yes, sometimes Greyhounds sleep with their eyes open and it’s hard to tell, especially for someone new to the breed and an individual dog if the dog is asleep or awake at times. She couldn’t tell, because his eyes were open. The girl went to give the dog a hug good night, but the dog was sleeping. They recently adopted their first Greyhound and they have an eight-year-old daughter. Over the weekend, I was asked a question by a new Greyhound adopter about a serious incident at her house.
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