Blake (fka Diesel)

We adopted our silver lab on March 1st of this year. He was 15 months old and 80 pounds. We were very excited to bring him home to meet our lab mix older dog. However, we ran into several days/weeks of mayhem. Poor guy was anxiety ridden and could not be left alone. My husband, son and I each took several days off of work to help with his transition into our home, but it was extremely rough. He did not know any commands and was not leash trained, so walks for exercise were impossible. He did not respond to his name. He had accidents all over the house, destroyed his crate, destroyed doors, and was just an energetic ball of anxiety. However, during all of this, we caught glimpses of a smart boy who wanted to please us, but did not know how. We discovered that he responded much better to the name ‘Blake’, which he was given by the breeder when he was born (different from the name he was adopted with). We made an appointment to have him neutered, which went well, but had awful complications that turned 10 days of recovery into 3 weeks. Poor guy was miserable (and so were we!) Finally, we were able to start dog training with a professional who taught us how to work with Blake and train him with positive reinforcement.

Thankfully Blake is very food motivated! What a smart pup he has turned out to be. He is now leash trained to a level where he doesn’t actually need a leash. He will lie on his dog bed as I vacuum the whole house (instead of chasing and attacking the vacuum cleaner). We can take Blake out to public places. Kids come up to us and ask to pet him and we can say yes. Blake has also been camping and boating with us. He loves to swim and play fetch in our pool. He has ridden 10 hours in the car with us, well-behaved. Our Blake still has all that puppy energy and needs LOTS of exercise. We could not have gotten through all of this without the support of Brookline and specifically Vincenzina, who went above and beyond guiding us through it all. We’ve adopted rescue dogs in the past, but this is our first time through Brookline. We are very thankful!