I picked up my first foster yesterday afternoon. I got her from BARC (the City of Houston animal shelter), so we don't know a lot about her. Everything went pretty well. She's very sweet and wants lots of affection. She loves fetch and playing with squeaky toys. Her housetraining appears to pretty solid - no accidents at all so far, and she does her business as soon as we go outside.
We took her on her first walk last night. It went fairly well, lots of sniffing, some pulling but not too bad. It was fairly late at night, so there weren't many people out and about. But there were two incidents that I'm a little concerned about:
- A man walked by a few feet from us, and she immediately tensed up. Became very alert and watched him very closely, but ultimately relaxed after he passed by us.
- Another man was walking his dog across the street from us, right as we were approaching my house. She immediately became very alert again, watched them for a few seconds ... and then she tried to bolt after them. She did not growl or bark or any other kind of vocalization. Fortunately, we had a harness on her, and we pulled her back and got her into the house.
Obviously, I am mostly concerned about the incident with the other dog. Is there any chance that she wasn't trying to attack the other dog? Or that this is early days growing pains? Since she didn't growl, I'm not absolutely positive that it was aggressive behavior. But it does seem like the most likely scenario.
