Okay I can talk more now.
My coonhound is adorable. But he has to be. If coonhounds weren't cute, no one would keep them. Seriously.
We got him at a shelter.
We called the shelter and asked about adoptions, but the shelter said "We are actually closing because we don't have the funds to stay open anymore. We stopped taking new animals, and we are just waiting til we got all of our current animals adopted out, once they're all gone then we will be closing."
We asked did they have any left now?
The shelter said "Well, we only have one dog left, so you won't have much to choose from. If you don't want to make the drive to come see him, I can tell you where there are other shelters.."
We asked, You're staying open for one dog??
The guy said, "We are trying to get him moved to another shelter but no one will take him. And none of our workers want him so I'm not sure what we'll do at this point. But like I said, you should probably go to a shelter where you'll be able to see lots of dogs at once."
We were like, well, we'll come see yours first, maybe we'll want him.
So we go. He's alone at the shelter, and the guy introduces him to us. The dog delights us. He was 4-6 months old, about 65 pounds, so a large dog, and he was adorable. He delighted us by shaking paws with each of us. He sat very still and looked at us when we talked, and seemed extremely calm.
We thought, he is so calm, that's great.
The guy DID warn us that he was being deceptively calm. He told us, "He's not actually like this, you know. He has a ton of energy, always doing something. He's probably nervous right now because he doesn't know you, and when he is nervous he acts very calm. I just want you to know this is not his personality."
The guy said he was a runaway from a home with a 4 ft fence where he was left outside all the time. The guy said you should not leave him outside all the time, he really needs companionship and when coonhounds are left out alone they can get destructive.
We asked if thats why the woman didn't keep him. He said, "She started to keep him outside because of being destructive, of course she was gone all day at work so he was lonely and bored. But when she kept him outside, he constantly ran away from home, nearly every day, so she said she just couldn't keep him."
Well, we didn't see much of a problem. At our house, he wouldn't be lonely or bored because there is always someone at home. And we wouldn't keep a dog outside all the time anyway.
We talked a while longer and the next 2 days we went back and brought him home.
Now he was only 4-6 months old, so we expected puppy behavior.
And we knew that for large breeds, they stay a puppy for 2 years, even though physically they may not look like a puppy anymore.
We expected it.
What we did not expect was that he would stay a puppy for the next twelve years.
He was already trained to go to the bathroom outside, so no problem there.
But there was everything else..
After a couple of exhausting days, we worked out shifts to watch him. Each person had to take four hour shifts....this included nighttime, if your shift was midnight to four am, then you better stay up till four am when the next person's shift starts. He needed constant watching. And it was more than just watching. He needed constant entertaining.
He actually slept quite a bit because after all he was still a puppy. But a lot of the time he was up, and we all have blurred memories from that year.
He was constantly into things, things you wouldn't expect. And you couldn't just put things up out of his way, for two reasons:
1, some of the things he would get into, could not be "put away"...such as the fireplace,
2, even when you do put things away out of his reach, he will find a way to get to them, coonhounds are clever and persistant and they look at everything as a challenge, nomatter where you put things out of his reach, he would find a way to access it.
One time he set his sights on a rolling pin. He wanted that rolling pin. We ended up child proofing the cabinets because he figured out how to open the drawers and cabinets by using his teeth to twist the knobs to open them.
He got the rolling pin out that way, so we moved it, but he got it again. Finally we put the rolling pin on top of the buffet in the dining room, because we figured he wouldn't know it was there, and the buffet is like 7 feet tall.
I remember it was my "shift" and I needed to use the bathroom. I thought, I'll be two minutes, whatever. While I was in there I heard scraping, then feet, then a clunk. I rushed out, to find him laying down on top of our dining room table, proudly holding the rolling pin in his mouth.
Coonhounds are extremely smart. He had pushed a dining room chair out so he could climb onto it and from there climb onto the table. He had put his front feet up on the buffet and used a biscuit tin that was up there to slide the rolling pin off. He was not chewing the rolling pin or anything, he was just holding it, looking proud that he had gotten it.
Coonhounds are proud of themselves when they work out challenges. Most breeds of dogs want to please their owners. Coonhounds usually don't care what you think. Scolding them generally does nothing because their attitude is, 'you're not happy with me, but oh well, as long as I got what I wanted!'
Don't think we weren't entertaining him enough.
First of all, to start with, they need a ton of toys (from the huge rubbermaid box full of toys, you would think we had like 6 dogs) but, you cannot leave the toys out.
You must rotate the toys so there's 3-5 toys out at any one time, coonhounds get bored fast so you rotate the toys so they stay interesting to him. Every couple of days you change out the toys.
The toys they need to get are ones that have challenges, like where you put a treat inside and they have to figure out how to get it out, etc. Or puzzle toys. If a toy has no challenge to it, he will not be interested.
And of course, toys alone are not enough. You need going running, playing with another dog, and games at home. I'll cover them seperately:
Going Running: I tried walking him, but walks are not enough, you will end up running, because he MUST get his energy out.
We went for long runs TWO to THREE TIMES A DAY, I kid you not. And he was NEVER once actually tired after we got done. Me? I was collapsing. My dog was like, "Great, let's do that again!!"
And in case I wasn't clear, the runs are IN ADDITION to the walks, NOT instead of.
Playing with another dog: A golden retriever lived next door. The neighbors said, our dogs are about the same age and same size, why don't we get them together to play? We were always looking for anything that would wear him out, so YES. They'd play together till the golden retreiver was too tired, then our dog would come home. And you know what the best part was? We didn't have to take him over there or pick him up. Yep, our dog would just hop their huge fence and go play. We would see him in their backyard playing with their dog, and we would all say "Did you take him over there?" etc but no one did.
It wasn't good that he could hop their fence, because whenever their dog got a new bone or a new toy, our dog would just hop the fence, pick up his bone/toy, and come home with it. We were constantly returning things to the neighbors, saying "Our dog stole this...again..."
The fence was around 5 ft high I think. For coonhounds you need 7-8 ft high fence and possibly higher, but our city doesn't allow fences higher than 6 ft.
Trust me we looked into it.
Games: If you want to avoid your dog climbing the dining room table like a billy goat, you must spend your days thinking of games for him to play. My dog's favorite is hide and seek. You can play this by hiding somewhere and letting your dog find you, but that's harder because as an adult there are not as many places you can fit into to really hide.
The best thing to do is get one of his toys, show it to him, have him sit, and then walk away. But you have to walk all over the house before you hide it though. Otherwise he smells the ground and follows exactly where you walked to. So you have to walk all over the house THEN decide where to hide it. When you come back, he will go look for the toy.
He is smart, so he will look at all the previous places you hid it. If it was in the bathtub last time, that's the first place he will look.
It's not enough to just place the toy behind something to hide it, you really have to get creative. He will still find it amazingly fast, even if it is inside a box of Christmas decorations that has old sheets piled up on top of it in the back corner of the basement with the door shut...
There are other games too, but hide and seek is his favorite.
He also likes games like jumping through hula hoops, oh, and he LOVES going to the playground. You have to go very early before any kids are up. He climbs the rope net thingy, he even goes down the slide. Not kidding. But his favorite thing is being on top of the jungle gym...he likes to feel tall.
It is tiring and time consuming to spend all your time thinking of things for your dog to do. But you have to do it, because if you don't, he will find things to do for himself. And the things he finds to do are not things you want him to do.
We expected all this to last a couple of years till he became an adult and settled a bit.
This June we had his birthday party. He turned 12. He has ONLY SLIGHTLY less energy than he had as a puppy. Like, we don't have to watch him absolutely every second anymore. But we do still have to always know where he is and moniter him, and he gets into everything still.
Today, Sept 3, he has done the following things (so far):
-Hopped over the couch--no, not jumped on it, literally hopped clean over it- he was behind the couch, all of a sudden he jumped over it and was on the other side
-Knocked over my trash can because I forgot to move it, and tore everything to bits
-Wanted to sleep in another room so used his nose to push his bed into the other room
-Was let outside and came back inside with a potato in his mouth--still can't quite figure that one out...
-We had put the cats in one room with the baby gate because we didn't want them all over the house since we are painting, but our dog doesn't like the cats being cooped up, so he took it upon himself to open the baby gate--No, not knock it over, but actually push the button that unlatches the little door, so they could get out.
-Put his bone in our mailbox.
He is 12 but loves shredding things. We couldn't stop the behavior, so we use it to our advantage. He shreds our documents for us. He doesn't eat them, he just holds everything with one paw and pulls it apart into pieces with his mouth.
His favorite thing to chew is wood, you have to be careful with that. We don't plant trees or shrubs. His first summer with us, we planted a tree (where you plant the little two foot tall thing) but he went outside and ate it. He was let out at night before bed, but took a long time, finally I went out there with a flashlight and saw him chewing something. I got him to come in, and when I looked in the morning the tree was gone. It was down to a nub on the ground, he had stood there chewing it down to the ground, eating it.
(Speaking of trees, if you have any fruit trees, he enjoys that too- he will stand at an apple tree and chew the apples right off the branches. But his favorite fruits are oranges. We don't live in a place where we could orange trees, which he would really go crazy over).
Anyway, back to chewing wood, he ate our picnic table. Well , maybe I'm being dramatic. He ate the bench. We didn't want him eating wood, so we removed the picnic table and benches and put them in the garage.
And it is hard to keep up on these things because they are so FAST. And when he knows he's doing something wrong, he does it FASTER, because he knows you'll make him stop. It literally takes him seconds to destroy something, and often it takes a while to figure out what it was, because it's unrecognizable.
Why couldn't we stop some of his behaviors? We tried. Oh believe me we tried.
We got books, but they were all too simple: be consistant, etc. Consistancy is SO IMPORTANT...but it's not enough. We needed specialized help.
We took him to dog school, where the instructor told us that our dog was distracting the other dogs with his antics, and wreaking havoc on his business.
We took him to another dog school, further away, where the instructor very politely told us, "maybe he just isn't ready to learn yet"
At that point we thought we need more individualized special help. We hired a dog psychologist who told us that he had all of the extremes of the breed and "does not make a good pet". Um, we've noticed.
We had private lessons from a dog trainer. She quit with no explanation. Not that we needed one.
We had another dog trainer.
She began making excuses to not come, and finally she just blurted out, "I am so sorry for you, I just don't know how you can live with him twenty four hours a day!!"
Our next dog trainer said, "Look, training him as if he's a normal dog won't work. Most dogs we start training with treats, but we don't keep using treats forever, because we want them to learn to listen even when they're not getting a treat. But that won't work with him. He knows what to do, he won't do it. Whenever you want him to do something, you'll have to bribe him with treats. He won't do anything unless he can see a benefit for himself."
Oh, and I forgot to mention the houndy odor. Coonhounds smell funny, and their hair gets greasy. He will need a bath more often than other breeds.
And yes, their noises they make are long and carry far. Neighbors don't like it.
After all this, let me say that I love love love my dog and think he is the cutest, most special, most darling dog there is.
But would I get another one, or reccommend them to anyone else??
Not a chance.
this movie. I've probably seen it over 100 times and cry everytime. 
if you enjoyed hearing about him, I think you'd really enjoy meeting him- I'd be glad to let you borrow him for a week or two or twenty. 
