the prayers of the saints

Gentry and I need some prayer.

Back story:

For those who don't know, Gentry and I got a dog back in January. He's an Australian Shepherd named Sebastian. He's a wonderful dog. He loves us, we love him. He even sleeps with us in our bed. He'll squeeze his way in between us, roll over on his back, and let us scratch his belly until he falls asleep.

Two weeks ago, the little girl who lives next door came over to play in the snow with us. We eventually headed inside, so she asked her mom if she could come over and hang out inside. While inside, we were all hanging out in the living room, when suddenly she jumped up to go look at something. Sebastian jumped up on her and nicked her ear. He was then put under quarantine for 10 days to make sure he didn't have rabies (which he didn't because he had just had his shots).

The reason he did this is because he's a herding dog. They don't like excessive movement. If Gentry or I get up to leave a room, he follows us. If someone comes over to the house and gets up to leave the room, he'll jump on them, kind of telling them to sit down and stay put. Picture it like herding sheep or something. What would he do if one tried to leave the flock?

So now we're up to present time. Just like any dog bite case, his was still being looked at after the quarantine, and he was going to have to go do a behavior assessment thing to make sure he's not a violent dog. This means that he has to be on a leash at all times until everything's over with. Yesterday he got out the house when Gentry was going outside and he chased our neighbor's cat. Someone called animal control about it and they came and picked him up last night, and he's now being held at the shelter until they can do the assessment. It really sucks, but that's the law so there's nothing we can do about it. But we should get him back Monday or Tuesday.

We've been thinking a lot about this whole situation over the past couple of weeks, and we think we need to get rid of him. When we have people over, or especially when we have kids, we don't want to have to worry about him jumping up or hurting them in any way. We don't want to give him back to the shelter, because the same thing will happen again. We've learned that he's not a house dog. He needs to be active and able to run around. He needs to be on a farm or somewhere that there's a lot of land. Since there's a lot of people with a lot of land around here, we're gonna start researching and asking around for someone who would want to take him.

The problem with this is that the shelter we got him from is very concerned about dogs being given away to people who don't know how to take care of dogs and then the dogs are abandoned. So we had to sign a contract saying that if we were ever going to give him up, we would only give him back to the shelter. So we're going to talk to the shelter and see if we can sort of just use them as a middle-man to get him to give him away.

Please be praying that this all works out.

Also, all this happened last night while we were having a party. So everyone got to witness it. What makes it even worse, is that the party was a celebration of Gentry being healed of Lyme disease 5 years ago.