CICHELLO DOG SAGA 

HANS, SKIPPER AND SHADOW

One of the first things Sam and I did after returning from our honeymoon was to take a trip to the Syracuse SPCA. We left there with a squirming, wiggly bundle of fur, a German shepherd which we named Hans.

We lived in an apartment in Onondaga Hills which had a long, sloping lawn in front where Hans could run to his heart's content.

There came a day when I couldn't find Hans. I got in the car and drove up and down snowy roads, window rolled down, calling "Hans! Hans!" No Hans.

Back at the apartment, crying, I called Sam at work. "Are you sure you looked everywhere in the apartment?" he asked.

"Of course I did." Then a thought. I looked under the bed. Yep..there lay the miserable wretch, fast asleep.

One night we let Hans out before bedtime. When we called him to come in, he didn't come. We called and we called, out in the moonlight searching. Then we heard a whine. Another whine. Our searching turned up nothing and still we heard the whining. It was coming from under the ground. Nah...Again we heard it. The end of the story is Sam out in the moonlight frantically digging and finally retrieving one very scared puppy from an underground drainage pipe.

Hans came to Weedsport with us, an integral part of our family. He guarded the babies out in the carriage for naps and was, in general, a warm, placid addition to the family. Then one day he disappeared. We searched high and low for days, called the police, anyone we could think of. He was never found.

We mourned for an interval, then off to the Auburn SPCA. This time we came home with Skipper, a full grown German shepherd. I was immersed in toilet training humans and didn't want to add a canine trainee to my workload.

The people at the SPCA had told us that this was a loving dog, good with children. He was. Only problem...he'd belonged to a Weedsport family before us and insisted on returning to his old stomping grounds. He'd also bonded with the female German shepherd of a farmer near his former home. When she was in heat, Skipper was there, not here. We retrieved him several times. This was in the days before leash laws.

One day, Skipper disappeared. Again the frantic searching. Then a phone call to say he'd been found. He'd been shot. The farmer offered us the pick of the litter being carried by their dog, since Skipper was undoubtedly the poppa.

So we come to Shadow. By this time, we had five kids and I was focused on survival, not dog training. Shadow was pure German shepherd, a nice dog but nobody had the time or energy to do more than housebreak him.

My husband Sam built a platform at the same height as our kitchen window, about six feet above the ground. From the platform, he had a ramp leading down to a large fenced-in play area. Here would be a safe area for dog and kids.

There were drawbacks to this seemingly intelligent solution as to what to do with Anthony, a rambunctious two year old, a rambunctious puppy and three little girls. You open the window, put Anthony out on the platform. He screams...he's terrified of the dog. So it became Anthony out, dog in; Anthony in, dog out. A further drawback: dog poop. I learned years later that those innocent bog sisters of Anthony would make him walk in it.

Shadow was anything but a shadow. He grew bigger and more rambunctious and began to terrorize the neighborhood. He wasn't a mean dog, just a huge dog that didn't know his own strength. There were complaints from the neighbors and when he knocked down an elderly woman, that was the final straw. I couldn't accept Sam's solution to tie him up, so after months of heated discussions, Shadow went to the Air Force as a guard dog.

Sam's edict: "If we send Shadow away, we will NOT get another dog and that's final!"

Hmmmm....