Welcome to a Small, Furry Blog. I thought I’d begin by making a somewhat brief introduction. For starters, there are a few other dog blogs on the Outside website and those are filled with sagacious, hard-earned advice about how to train and care for your dog. This advice comes from folks who really know what they’re talking about.

This is definitely not that blog.

In fact, whatever wisdom I might have on subject canid is ad hoc at best and probably better ignored.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First, the dogs in my care are not your average dogs. Alongside my wife, Joy Nicholson, I co-run the Rancho de Chihuahua dog sanctuary—a dog sanctuary for special needs dogs.

Our pack size varies, but usually we have around 25 dogs in our care. Those dogs fall into three categories. We do hospice care for the aged, giving elderly dogs a place to die in peace. We also do long term rehabilitation for severely abused, terribly ill and mentally and physically handicapped dogs. These are dogs that usually need a year or two of work before they’re eligible for adoption. Most of these do eventually find new homes, but a few end up loving too crazy for adoption. Rescuers call these dogs “lifers,” and we have about eight of those right now. Finally, we also take on a couple young fosters at a time. These are usually healthy puppies with mild traumas. We nurse them back to health in a month or two and then find them homes.

Our dogs have great lives—that much for certain. My wife has something of an international reputation for her ability to heal dogs. It’s not unusual for us to receive a dog from a vet with a warning that the dog has a month to live at best, but much of the time that month stretches into two, three, four…usually years. If you ask my wife the secret to her technique she’ll say “I just let the dogs be dogs and love them for it.”

What does that really mean? Well, we don’t cage any of our dogs. We don’t separate them from one another or from us. Outside of “No Fighting” our sanctuary has almost no rules. This is done intentionally. We go out of our way to cultivate an environment as close to the hunter-gather environment that dogs evolved to live in. This means large packs of dogs, a few humans, and a completely different rule structure—and that’s the real reason you might not want to take my advice.

Our goal—what we’ve discovered to be the very best way to promote healing and happiness— is loving cooperation. I want to find the best way to cooperate with the dog, and the best way for them to cooperate with me. This means I bend to their will the vast majority of the time.

Let me give you one example. We have a few feral dogs here—some have been here for years—none have I yet to touch. I co-exist in the same space with these ferals. I feed them and care for them and mostly stay out of their way. Why should you ignore this advice? Simple. Most people don’t want to be around a dog they can’t touch.

Another version of this is how we do our adoptions. If you want one of our dogs, you come over, sit down at a table on the back porch and then we open the door to the house and let the dogs pour out. The point of this is not to let the human do the choosing. We let our dogs choose. And if they don’t like the potential adopter, well they don’t go home with the potential adopter.

Essentially, if I were to sum it up in a sentence, we try to look at every situation from the dog’s perspective and then we try to cooperate with their vision. Of course, since we lack a verbal common language, this can get pretty messy at times.

But truthfully, that’s the real fun. And sometimes those feral dogs do come around. And when you’ve been living with a dog for two years before they finally walk over and decide to give your hand a lick—well that one lick, let’s just say it’s astronomically more than worth the wait.