About a month after buying Levi, I had brought all of his immunizations and paperwork up to date, bought him food, spent some time training him, and bonded with him completely. If he could help it, where I went, he followed. I had gotten into the habit of taking him for walks from my house to a nearby lake and park, where he would greet all the passers by with a wagging tail and a friendly lick to the face if they were careless enough to put their faces in range of his lightning quick tongue.
Up to this point, though, I had been walking him off-leash with no problems. He never strayed too far, and was always very friendly with all the people and dogs in the park (I would say animals, but he seemed to already have an instinct for his bird-dog pedigree, as he chased any waterfowl he could see). I knew it was time to do some leash training before he got too set in his ways, though, so I had just gone out and bought him a brand new leash and collar (with all of his teething and other puppy antics and my love of motorcycles, I thought it fitting to get him some Harley Davidson branded stuff).
As soon as I put the leash on him, of course, he rebelled. He bit at it, he jumped straight up in the air trying to spin out of it, and even tried to pull the handle out of my hand with his tug-o-war jerks. He never strayed farther from me than the leash allowed when he was off leash, but now all of a sudden, the freedom to do so was gone, so it was an issue to him. What if he wanted to go farther?
After some work, he adapted, although to this day, he doesn't seem to get the concept of slack leash walking. Any method of training I have tried: gentle leader, regular collar, shock collar, choke collar, pinch collar, and even veterinary training, Levi always seems to want to go faster, no matter the speed I am already going. In any case, this particular day, Levi was still too little to exert any real pull on me, and we were taking our first long walk through the park by Laguna Lake. He made his usual friends along the way, catching the interest of some children and their parents at the playground, and old man sitting on a bench, a couple of runners coming by, and a pair of student sitting at a table studying. He spotted some ducks near the shore and made his usual bolt in their direction only to be cut short by the end of the leash.
The old man, while petting Levi, shared a story with me about his yellow lab (who had passed away some years before) and how it was his constant companion. He tried to express to me how much the relationship with his dog meant to him, and to instill in me an appreciation for a dog as friendly and as devoted as Levi already seemed to be at such a young age. After some time, Levi and I moved on. I smiled to myself, reflecting on the openness with which the man talked to me, simply because my dog reminded him of his. We had never met before, and probably never would again, but he shared moments of his life with me that were probably at the same time both painful and a joy to recount.
As I rounded the path in the park onto the sidewalk back to my house, lost in my thoughts, I heard a voice from my left. I turn and there in the road is a Chevy Suburban, with a girl about my age, stopped in the middle of traffic on a 45 MPH street, asking me how old my dog was, and telling me how cute he was. I was dumbfounded. I answered her, and she noted how cute he was, and then drove of, like nothing had happened, and it was just an everyday occurrence. I just laughed to myself the rest of the way home. Within a 10 minute period of time, Levi had the power to bring an old man to share a piece of his life with me, and then to stop traffic (albeit for only ten seconds or so). In terms of starting conversations and meeting people, this dog was like fishing with dynamite.
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