Our Ruthenian Shepherd has an unusual history. Back in 1999, I was doing field work in Barbados when Mrs Vache Folle wrote me that she had been encountering a feral dog in the park. I tried to reach her for several days for fear that she would adopt this dog as we already had three dogs. At the time we had the mixed breed hound littermates Cassidy and Sundance and a blue eyed red dog, our emergency back up dog, Trudy. When the Mrs walked these dogs in the park, the feral dog would join her on her walks. He was about 6 months old at the time.
My fears were unfounded since the feral dog would not even let anyone pet him, let alone domesticate him, and I still had only three dogs when I returned home that autumn. I met him immediately as he inevitably showed up when I walked the girls or fired up the barbecue. He was a scrawny black dog of about 50 pounds with brown socks and brown Rottweiler eyebrows. His body type was Alsatian. He was a good looking, dignified dog, and he got along well with our alpha dog Cassidy, aka "the bitch queen from hell". He befriended Bob, the sexagenarian owner of Princess, a ball obsessed shepherd mix, who spent lots of time in the park, probably to stay away from his shrewish girlfriend. He waited outside Bob's apartment every morning and raced Bob's car to the park. Bob was almost always the first dog owner in the park in the morning.
The dog became known throughout the Bryn Mawr neighborhood in Yonkers and had lots of friends who fed him. His bad habits were limited to stealing baseballs from Little League games and harassing Simba the Husky, his nemesis. He always thwarted the dog catcher. Folks to the north of the park called him Pal. To the south he was Hobo, and to the west, where we lived, he was called Jesse.
Jesse made the rounds of our neighborhood every day looking to be fed. The Mrs fed him, and if he could not find anything better he would eat in our driveway. Our neighbor often provided lamb and Greek food; another provided Italian food; yet another featured rather elaborate concoctions of meat and cheese and leftover cold cuts from a family deli.
Jesse began to show up at our house at our usual dog walk times to join the girls. Then he started showing up and barking at the door to be "walked" by Mrs Vache Folle. He lived on a walk as far as I was concerned, but he loved for Mrs Vache Folle to go on a stroll with him every evening without the other dogs. In winter, Mrs Vache Folle set up bedding in the back porch of the house. This was sheltered from the elements, and Jesse slept there almost every night. Mrs Vache Folle kept the bedding clean and dry, and she decided, over my objection, to try to domesticate the fellow. She caught him a couple of times, but he became almost catatonic with fear and dismay when we brought him in the house. When we walked him he "pulled a Ghandi" at the farthest point from the house and had to be released.
Ae some point, Jesse began to let Bob pet him and leash him up to keep him away from Simba. We arranged for a mobile vet to come to the park and give him vaccinations and a check-up. Gradually, Jesse began to trust us more and more and more or less lived on our porch. The neighbors started feeding him in our driveway, and I would come home to some pretty delicious looking offerings every day. I became resigned to the idea that he would eventually become our dog.
One day in 2001, Jesse was hit by a car, and he dragged himself over 7 blocks to our house. Bob saw the whole thing and followed him. I took Jesse to our vet where he got treatment over several days. We had him castrated when he recovered enough and brought him home as our dog. He was too injured to fight about it at this point and seemed to appreciate the comforts of indoor life. Cassidy allowed him about 30 square feet in the living room as his assigned space, and he never left this without a human escort for several months.
Early on, we acclimated Jesse to the car by taking him to fun places. Within a couple of months of taking him in we took him to my mother's farm in Georgia. He loved the road trip, and he really took to the cattle. He spent every moment he could with the cows , and he bonded with us and the girls. He did not (and to this day does not) like the open riser stairs in the motel in Virginia on the way home and had to be carried up them. Otherwise, he was right away a wonderful non-feral dog and has been ever since, except for dog aggression issues.
We named him Jesse Lou Baggett after my great great grandfather so we could refer to him in his presence as Mr Baggett without alerting him to the use of his name. Now he loves his comforts, and it is hard to imagine that he was ever feral. The girls are all dead now, and Jesse is Alpha.
Why do we call Jesse a Ruthenian Shepherd even though he is a mutt of indeterminate breed? He has a habit of carrying his food to a private place and used to try to take bowls of dog food up the stairs. The food would fly out of the bowl, and Jesse would be left with an inexplicably (to him) bowl at the top of the stairs. I began to call him a "Polish Shepherd" as an ethnic dig at Mrs Vache Folle (all in love, of course). We later learned that some of Mrs Vache Folle's ancestors were Ruthenian, an ethnic group now in Poland related to Ukrainians, so Jesse became a Ruthenian Shepherd, sometimes known as a "Carpathian". This is fun to pull on people who are impressed with purebred dogs.
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