The Adventures of Alvin: Episode 5

New Year's Day, 2004: Devestation and Damage

After almost 2 full years of enjoying Alvin during his baby years, my dad passed away on New Year's Day, and his last words to my mom were, "Please take care of Alvin." The result was a remaining 10 years (and still counting) of time of Alvin progressively behaving worse and worse. The combination of his deafness, the drastic changes in his life, such as having a father figure that was home 24/7 and catered to his every need for the first 2 years of his young developing life, now gone, he became impossible to deal with. He developed an intense separation anxiety that overcame him as he destroyed the house and everything in it if he ever was left alone. Becoming misplaced from his new favorite sleep spot and his favorite room constantly as family members came to live with us for short periods of time on and off throughout the next few years, he progressively became worse and worse in behavior. We tried working with him, but with the added stress of mourning and grieving, the ability to acknowledge what had been happening to him isn't something we realized until years later. He was becoming ruined. My mom began adopting and taking in some dogs, which partially helped keep Alvin inline, because he now had some buddies when he was left alone and also some companions to play with. But in combination with my aunt's dog who was living with us for a while made a total of 5 dogs which was too many to handle. We had to find homes for 2 of ours, neither of those 2 being Alvin because my mom felt she had to honor my dad's last wishes. As Alvin's behavior grew worse and worse (with Weiner as the only companion he had left), my mom wanted so badly to send him off to a farm somewhere or get him adopted through the Springer Spaniel rescue. As a young teen attached to my dog and the only part of my dad I felt I had left, I of course wouldn't let her. She felt she had missed out on a window of time where  he could have been adoptable, because matters only got worse from there. My grandma came to visit one day with her shih tzu, and Alvin attacked her. Never been dog aggressive before, this was now a new defect to add to his list of defects. He has gone after every dog he has seen or met ever since that day. 

As a result, Alvin is a monster. A problem. But what could we do? Knowing not until later that all the factors within our home, and environmental changes caused his craziness, there wasn't much we could do to reverse it, although we tried. Becoming harder and harder to work with him, and the guilt of just trying to do whatever it took to keep my dad happy for the remainder of his life, it was a toss up of whether it was now worth to suffer with the damages it had caused. The gift we had received as a living memory of my dad, forever, was Alvin. Oh, joy.