Chima's Journey: A Reflection on Progress

We live in a world that is always about that next step, focusing on future goals. I'm not saying that's a completely awful thing, but I think that often we forget to reflect on our progress.

Over the years I've worked with many dogs who had a long journey to get to a place where they were comfortable living in the human world. I learned to not focus on the dogs' struggles or their history, or even more importantly, not to compare them to a static "end goal" that I had created for them. Instead we learned to just live in that moment of learning - on the tiny baby step we were working on - and in that way I was regularly reinforced by the tiny pieces of progress that we made.

Unfortunately many of us forget to pause and celebrate the overall progress that has been made. After all, 100 baby steps adds up to a lot of progress. Last week I had a reminder to stop and celebrate a whole mess of baby steps that have added up to a pretty amazing dog.

Last Thursday Chima and I had a lot on our to-do list: a vet visit, followed by a trip to the pet store to pick up some supplements followed by our evening Nose Work class.

Chima has always been hypersensitive to touch and to people she doesn't have a long history with so we've worked long and hard to make our nail trims at the vet a positive experience. As the tech clipped her nails she said, "man, it's amazing how relaxed Chima is now during trims." I smiled, agreed with her and really didn't think much more about it.

After the vet visit we loaded into the car for our stop at Mud Bay, a natural pet food store, to pick up some supplements. Chima stood cautiously in the entryway as three well meaning clerks descended on us with treats. Chima slowly walked up to each of them, gave them a quick sniffdown, gently took the treat from their fingers and then walked around the store with me on a loose leash sniffing all the bulk bins and behaving herself like she's never had a naughty thought in her life.

Then it was home to unload the car and get reloaded to drive the 40 minute drive over to our Nose Work class. Chima rocked the class, prancing as she quickly found the hides, and after each search, walking up to participants and giving them a quick sniff (or licking their pocket if they had particularly great treats.)

On the drive home I had 40 minutes to think about our day together and realized that while this might be a normal day for some dogs, for Chima this was amazing. For a dog who started out semi-feral this was like an Olympic gold medal for being a domestic pet dog. I needed to value how amazing her accomplishments were, even though those accomplishments had become the norm.

So I looked back at some of the posts (Stupendously Wonderful Baby Steps and Touchdown)  that I did about Chima soon after she arrived in our home. It amazed me how far she has come - from not wanting to be on the couch if another person is there, to doing her best to always claim the spot closest to me if I am on the couch, even if that means sitting on top of Salinas. We went from dreaming that one day she would want to sit on my lap to now, complaining because she crowds us so much.

So stick with it. One day all those baby steps will add up to some great progress.