Her biggest thing that we're working on is barking right now, but other than she's starting to be a really good listener. Naturally stubborn though for sure! There's actually a little story about when we got her. A couple days after taking her home, we noticed something funny was going on with her elbow joints and she started to hobble. It was getting worse every day. Turned out she had a congenital defect that caused the upper arm bones in her front legs to not sit in the sockets of the lower legs. It affected both front leg joints. We took her to a local a vet and he told us she would be crippled for her entire life. My girlfriend was really upset by this, cried a lot that night over that. But we didn't give up, we went to a place called VOSM, an orthopedic veterinary hospital. She had a surgery that involved putting some metal rods through her joints to help scar tissue to build up around them, for several months - I forget how many actually. She was pretty miserable, we were trying to house train her and we couldn't get the dressings wet and it was raining and snowing every day it seemed. But we all made it through, and the day she came home from the hospital and they removed the cast (her legs had to be held straight for many weeks, imagine not bending your elbows for that long) and she started running around like crazy, like a normal dog, man - I have to admit it brought a tear to my eye. She ran around so much we were a little worried because she was supposed to take it easy post surgery for a little while! We curbed it as much as we could, but everyone was so happy to see her run around like a normal puppy. She has two battle scars on both arms to show for it, and she goes on walks, plays and runs all over the place like mad.
I feel like if we didn't rescue her (the surgery was pretty expensive), who knows what her fate would have been. I try not to think too much about it, she's got us now and she's gonna have a full and happy life!
Here's the pathetic little thing in her cast:
