Shadow-dog training, morphing, losing his naïveté in a violent world

Shadow-dog has been missing Laudie-dog. You can tell by little behaviors. Me too. For instance, while there’s plenty of canned dog food, there’s also a dry-dog-food bin with which to alternate. There’s been two measuring cups in that bin for years, one is huge, made out of pryex, for Shadow-dog, and another, a smallish plastic measuring cup for Laudie-dog. It’s been how long since Laudie-dog died? And it’s only now it hit me that her measuring cup doesn’t need to be in that bin any more? It’s one of those thousand moments when you’re more self-aware that currents run deep…

Meanwhile, Shadow-dog, alone in holding down the fort, has been upping his game with ripping things to shreds as pictured above with his martial arts rope. He uses centrifugal force with great precision much like nunchaku. His greatest de-escalation technique is still his attention-getting voice, his greatest weapon his teeth and jaws, not that he’s ever had to use the latter.

Meanwhile, however great a fighter Shadow-dog might imagine himself to be, he’s still filled with naïveté.

Meanwhile, one of our police officers of retired fame, totally a dog guy, apparently got scared ****less (the description of the neighbor) when he stopped by (I wasn’t home). Running over to the neighbor, he had exclaimed: “I didn’t know Father George had a Bite-Dog!!! He’s huge!!!”

I admit, Shadow-dog is a bit intimidating, as he comes in quite a bit taller than the usual upper-max GSD height. All muscle, as he trains all day. He’s at the top of his game right now. But he’s also morphing, though he’s on the younger side of middle age. He’s losing his jet blackness. I think sanfelipe007 told me that would be the case years ago. Tell-tail wolf-brown patches have started in behind all four paws.

I’m imagining this is his new camouflage needed for upcoming golden-years, as it were. It’s a big, bad world out there and he’ll need all the help he can get. He’s also having to lose some of his naïveté, an ultra-socialization that was instilled into him during his first 18 months before I got him, eating, as he did, at the high-school cafeteria every day. The more trained up, the more camouflage, the more he’s a realist, the more loyalty he’s developing.

Shadow-dog got smacked hard on his snout last week, opening up a shallow but tender wound. Who knows how that happened, but I’m thinking someone reached over the fence to fake-pet him but instead smacked him hard with some sort of straight-edge. It’s healed now. He’s tough. But I’m sure he doesn’t like that treatment, not for himself, not for any other dogs. A stranger that mistreats a dog is how to make a dog an enemy and make him more loyal to his territory and owner at the same time.

Meanwhile, while Shadow-dog loses his naïveté, he also demonstrates that he has a big heart. He has a kind of crying mixed with anxiety mixed with anger mixed with eagerness to help when he hears bad and evil things going on in this part of town. I’m told that he was making this kind of commentary the other day. One of the neighbors said they heard what sounded like a dog who just got mortally wounded and was screaming bloody murder a bit further away in our part of the town, with shots fired and police called. Of course, animal abuse is a felony in North Carolina. Police are especially interested in stopping this, not only to rescue the animals, but because if someone’s hurting an animal, it’s pretty much guaranteed that human beings are being treated in the same way. Everyone had already fled.

Meanwhile, no matter how trained up and ready for the big bad world we think we are, we always have more naïveté to lose than we would ever care to admit. Some of us have already seen really a lot of bad and evil things in this life. I myself have seen really a lot of evil in every sector of society right around the world, from the very bottom to the very top, and it just continues, so much so that that I’m quite continuously exclaiming that I’m just so very naïve. My parishioners can testify to this.

I think this is a good thing to lose one’s naïveté, so as to see things as they are, and who we really are before God and neighbor. The best way to do this, everyday, is to behold Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, you know, with the wounds still upon His risen body. Stare at the wounds, lose naïveté. Jesus often spoke of malicious wolves, and our own selves being sent out amidst the wolves who would make sport of us, tossing us about and ripping us to shreds, you know, as the Master so the disciple. How can we not see those wounds? How can we not lose our naïveté?

The perfect camouflage in a bad and evil world is to look like a criminal in the bad and evil world, but in this way to so let our light shine before men…