Segan's Day Out.

Hey guys been a while.   I wanted to upload some pics Segan and I took while were on a recent jaunt through Demarest (NJ) park.

Things Segan Likes

1. Being petted.  Segans face lights up when you scratch the backs of ears and rump.   
2. Chasing his Jolly Ball.  When we first picked Segan up he really only understood the game of tug.   As we continued to play with him we learned he would will play with quite simply anything you coax his interest toward.

(to be continued)

Our first challenge after getting Segan home was introducing him to Axl, our two year old male American Pit Bull Terrier.   This was to be no small chore as Segan, also a male, is most certainly a Pit mix.  First and foremost we were worried the possibility of a fight could endanger future attempts to either acclimatize these two dogs to one another or to others down the road.

Upon reflection we may have rushed this process despite the fact that no ill came of it.   I had read a bit on the subject here as well as here.  The consensus among the resources I have come to respect is that this process can take up to a month!

We "knew" from Segan's paperwork that he got along well with others.   Our experiences with Axl had been generally positive as well so while we could have certainly been more cautious we felt comfortable proceeding as follows:

We first introduced them on neutral ground, away from our house.  A friend of mine and I walked the two dogs in a figure eight pattern across a ball field.   This approach allowed the two dogs to gradually "meet" one another via smell and prevented them from approaching each other directly.   After 30 minutes it had grown dark so we proceeded to individually bus the dogs home.

We elected to introduce Segan to the house first without Axl there to allow him to range freely and get to know the place.   He was given 20 minutes to do this and then crated when we brought Axl in.  At this point we learned Segan had never been crate trained.  He bit at the door out of what seemed to be extreme frustration.  My plan to "crate-n-rotate" thus quickly fell apart and we needed to find another way to cohabitate the dogs while carefully controlling their environments.

Once we made the decision that Sunday night to rescue Segan we needed to act quickly: Brooklyn ACC planned to euthanize  him if no one stepped forward in the next 48 hours.   We made the trip out to Brooklyn and apart from some terrible traffic had him safely home Tuesday evening.

On the trip we got to learn a little bit about the this gentle fellow:

• If the windows are closed and he is seated in the back seat, Segan loves to position himself in the middle of the car where he can "participate" in front seat conversations.  From this vantage point he will quietly watch out the front of the vehicle.
• With the driver's side window down he will move in behind you and sniff the breeze while resting his soft muzzle on your right shoulder.
• He can drink from a tilted water bottle (although a bit sloppily :).

We learned of Segan's plight on an October Sunday.  The man needed our help.  Rescued five years earlier by the Closter Animal Welfare Society (CLAWS) he had found himself in the Brooklyn Animal Care Center (ACC).  Segan had been surrendered there by his former owner (of five years) after he received notice by his landlord

Our CLAWS contact informed us he was nine years old and was "intact."   He would need to have surgery before we picked him up.   The following "mugshot" was our first introduction to Segan and serves as the first important lesson of adopting shelter animals: Don't use the pictures they post as a way to evaluate their beauty:

Much of what we knew about Segan up to this point was gleaned from this document, the paperwork provided to us by ACC.