Dublin

These are pics of Dublin in my van yesterday as we got ready to drive home, and on my property today exploring my driveway.

A recap of Dublin’s history: roughly a year ago, he was abandoned in an apartment when his original owners moved out. He was microchipped, and from the chip the most recent owners, who rescued him from the empty apartment, were able to find out his registered name and birthdate.He is AKC registered. This owner has failing vision and can no longer handle him and called me to give him up to rescue; although I haven’t actively done rescue for about 10 years, my number is still floating around the internet, and once or twice a year I get calls from someone wanting to adopt or place a dog. By coincidence, one of my remaining two senior dobes just died, and I’ve been gearing up in the last few weeks to adopt a new dog from a shelter — but, of course, I’d rather have another dobe! So the timing was serendipitous.

Dublin is going to be a work in progress. I have not had any trouble with him so far, except that he really, REALLY wants to eat my cats. Reeeeeeaaaaaally wants to. A muzzle and a lead are going to be required elements of retraining him for a good while.  In addition to that, he has a history of being tormented by children in the apartment complex where he lived, so I am going to have to be VERY careful with him in public until I can see how he reacts. Again — a muzzle will be involved. Other than those two things, he seems to be a fairly typical young male doberbrat who thinks he is King of the World and who hasn’t had somebody in his life who can really take charge and teach him what’s acceptable. He’s intelligent and wiggly and already quite velcro, which is normal for the breed; and he hasn’t shown any bad behavior with the other dogs, though his exposure to them has been limited so far.

I was able to find his registration info on the AKC site, and he is nearly 3 years old rather than the 2 years I was told, but that’s okay. More humorous is that it turns out he’s a “Z” doberman — which is doberman shorthand for a dog that has an albino doberman somewhere in his family tree. That’s funny because I fought for years against the breeding of albino dobermans when I was active in rescue. Sigh! He is scheduled for neutering on Wednesday, which would be happening with or without that “Z” designation, but I am extra-special happy to be removing those genes from the population!

Oh, and his most recent owners have been calling him “Doobie”, but — yeah — I don’t think so! Right now I’m working on reminding him that Dublin is his name, but I’m not 100% sure I’ll stick with that either. We Shall See!

I love this breed so much!