Bud is a smart and resilient animal, he has adjusted well to our lives and our farm, better than I could have imagined. Yet he is also a canine trauma victim, I have never bought or adopted a dog who was mistreated in the way that he was, and sometimes it shows.

There are certain things – movements, corners, sounds – that will send Bud into a near hysterical terror, and it is not always clear why. He  shivers and cowers for many minutes, and even food won’t pull  him out of it right away.

I’ve never seen a dog be as frightened as Bud sometimes – rarely gets – and the more I learned about his abandonment and confinement, the more I understand why. Bud is a very generous and grounded animal, but he is also very damaged, and when the scars show themselves, it is a hard thing to see.

We have a small crate we never use, and it’s under a table near my desk. Since he always goes into Fate’s crate without any resistance, I assumed he would do the same. We want to put Fate back into her crate when we leave, she gets restless and sometimes gets into trouble loose in the house.  Fate often needs re-ducating. For her sake and ours, we want to go back to crating her when we’re gone.

I tossed a treat into the small crate I wanted Bud to  use, and he took one step towards the crate and then just melted into absolute terror, paralyzed and shaking and whining piteously, in a way I have hardly ever heard a dog sound.

Instinctively, and without thinking, I grabbed his collar and pulled him towards the crate, thinking he would recognize it and just go on, as he always does. But he just became more terrified, froze, dragged his feet, shook so hard I worried about his heart.

I help people with dog troubles, I can be smart, but like so many other people, I can also be quite stupid. My response made it much worse, and I thought “he must never go near that crate again.”

This crate was small, and the sides were some kind of hard plastic, Bud could see out of either ends, but not the sides.

Something about going into this small and enclosed space triggered a horror in him, I imagined that he had been confined in a tiny space, starved and abandoned, that is one of the stories I heard about his former life. The other dogs with him died of starvation or exposure, that’s why the rescuers came to buy his freedom.

He would not go near this crate, not for anything, and not once he sensed I was trying to push him in there.

His enclosure looked just like this, I thought, or perhaps he was confined for days, weeks or months in a small crate. That was my best guess after watching him. I kicked myself for making such a silly mistake, had I damaged the trust I had worked so hard to establish with Bud? It was a horrible moment for him, and for me.

But I pulled myself together and remembered that my job is not to berate myself for being all too human, but to strategize and help this dog get to a better place, and keep his trust for me.

We threw the small crate out and I drove the first thing to Petco and bought a medium-sized crate, open on all sides. Normally I would get a smaller crate for a Boston Terrier, but I could see Bud had a terror of being confined in a small space without sight on the sides. That was my sense of it.

I brought the crate home and we assembled it in the living room, Bud was watching. For the  first two or two-and-a-half days, I would simply toss a biscuit or favorite treat in the cave and towards the rear of the crate and walk out of the room, making sure Fate and Red were with me.

Bud circled the crate, tried to get in through the back. Then he figured out where the entrance was, and stuck his nose in, then backed off. I watched him from the dining room, after a few sniffs he walked gingerly in, snatched the biscuit and turned around.

I did this perhaps 10 or 15 times during the day. He is a grounded dog, despite his trauma, he works through things rather than just run. He got a bit more comfortable with each biscuit.

We fed him in the crate, putting the bowl towards the rear. He walked in and ate his food. There is no place dogs love more than the place where they eat.

By the second day, he was walking in, looking over his shoulders, but getting less wary. He likes snacking in a crate because Fate stalks  him and will steal the food if she can (he returns the favor.) When he had one of his peanut-butter filled bones, he would sit in the crate and chew it.

He came to see the crate as safe. We put a quilt over the top and sides to make it more like a cave, which is a natural place for dogs, who are den animals in the wild.

This morning, he came in from being outside and went into the crate – still in the living room in front of my chair – and lay down and slept. When he got up, he stole one of Fate’s small rawhide chips and ran into the crate to eat it while she paced outside of the crate, looking for a way in. (The door was open, but she didn’t try to get in.)

That was it. We had flipped this around, Bud was at  home in this new crate, and that will be the crate he  goes into when we go  out for a long time. I locked him in a half-dozen times today, and Maria also did while I was out.

I am glad we turned this uncomfortable situation around. I need to remember that Bud has suffered some traumas that are not known to me. If we had made Bud terrified of crating, that would have dramatically altered the balance in our house and made any kind of training a nightmare.

I want to say that we are all  human, we all make mistakes. Some people can see them and admit them and some people can’t. I learn so much from my mistakes, and when I make them, it’s the dog who pays for it.

Training a dog is a creative process, we may not be nicer than them, but we are smarter. It is always the human’s fault when things go wrong, somewhere along the line.

So we ended up in a good place. Bud is teaching me all the time to wake up and think. In the photo above, Bud is chewing on his stolen rawhide. The door to the crate was open.

Bud has challenged me in new and important ways, I am grateful for the lessons.