It is Tuesday afternoon. I am on the banana peel of By Reason of Insanity. I don’t want to step off it for fear I won’t be able to get back on—sort of like falling off a surfboard. But it’s also the day I need to write the blog. So I’m going to cheat.

A couple of weeks ago one of the blogs mentioned the Academy for Canine Behavior. It’s a place that shows up in both my blogs and my books.

Yes, I know all about product placement in movies and television shows, where companies pay money to have their products placed in the background of film sets, but that’s not what this is. The Academy has been connected to our family for decades, and my mentioning of them comes with no monetary exchange of any kind.

When two people responded to that recent blog, asking about the Academy, I wrote a long email telling them more about it. Turns out it’s a long story, and part way through, it occurred to me that it might make a good blog post. ell, folks today is that day. But the first section, the one about Mandy, happened before we were introduced to the Academy, so I’ll start there.

Mandy was an elderly free-to-good-home platinum golden retriever. At the time we took her in, she had been horribly neglected—her collar was too tight, and she was absolutely filthy. It took hours to clip the clumps of tangled fur off her hind legs. We had been told she had arthritis, so we fed her baby aspirin which seemed to make her a bit more spry. The problem is, what she had wasn’t arthritis—it was bone cancer.

Instead of adopting her, we did what I’ve now come to understand is Fospering—providing hospice care for an abandoned and geriatric family pet.

We ended up having Mandy for six short months, but when we lost her, I was devastated. I was writing a book at the time, Beaumont #9, Payment in Kind, in which Beau is finally reconnected to his long-estranged grandparents. When he walks up onto his grandparents’ front porch for the first time, what should he see lying there, but his grandfather’s beloved platinum golden retriever named Mandy. That’s what I do with dogs after we lose them—they end up in books.

We didn’t know about the Academy at the time we took Mandy in, but we did (see below) by the time Beau’s widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont, married for the second time. That’s why Mandy boarded at the Academy while Beverly and Lars Jenssen went off on a honeymoon cruise with Beau along for the ride.

That’s the part that wasn’t in the email replying to my blog readers’ requests for information. Here’s the rest:

Decades ago now, when our then-college-aged son came home with a tiny pound-puppy named Boney at Thanksgiving, I offered to housebreak him between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I did, but when he went back to Pullman after Christmas, he had bonded with Grandma and our two golden retrievers. All he did was cry, so back he came, becoming dog #3.

Soon he started to grow and grow. I took him to see our vet when he was about six months old and asked what kind of dog he was. The vet looked at me and said, “He’s a black-and-tan Canardly.” I was astonished, “Really?” I asked. “What kind of dog is that?” “Well,” the vet replied, “I can hardly tell what kind of dog he is, but I think he’s half German shepherd and half Irish wolfhound.” He was, and Boney kept on growing.

A few months later, while chasing a tennis ball in the house, he crashed into a brass and glass table in the living room and broke a tooth. Our vet, who didn’t do root canals, referred us to one who did. When we came back to pick Boney up after the procedure, the vet lit into us, telling us that we had a vicious dog on our hands, one who needed to be put down immediately. Turns out, he had tried doing the root canal without giving Boney enough anesthetic. If someone did that to me, I’d probably try to bite them, too.

We went back to our first vet. He said Boney had clearly been taken from his mother far too soon which made him skittish, and skittish dogs can be dangerous dogs. He suggested we send Boney to the Academy for Canine Behavior for a six-week boot camp. We did so, and they turned him into a complete gentleman of a dog. At one point, an unsupervised three-year old put two pointy fingers up his nose, and Bony didn’t move a muscle.

By then we were Academy true believers, so we sent Nikki and Tess off for some training, too. Eventually our next pair, Aggie and Daphne, went there, as well. Along the way, Colleen McDaniel, the Academy’s owner, realized we were Golden people. When two separate families had to give up their dogs due to a divorce in one case and changed circumstances in another, two additional Goldens came to our family as rescues—our first grand dogs—Kensie and Sky.

Then someone showed up at the Academy with a dog named Angel. The woman who brought her in claimed she was too stupid to learn anything, and her husband had given her a choice—either the dog went or she did. (I’ve often wondered if she didn’t eventually come to realize that she’d made the wrong choice in getting rid of the dog.) Like the dog mentioned in Cheryl’s comment, Colleen was able to teach Angel to do one of those “too stupid to learn” tricks in less than an hour.

Angel became Kensie’s sister. For months on end, they spent days kenneled in the back of our daughter’s Suburban in the garage at the U-Dub Hospital while our son-in-law was battling melanoma. When our grandson came along, I’m pretty sure Colt thought he was a golden retriever, too. He certainly ate his fair share of kibble.

Years passed. so did Kenzie and eventually Angel, too, but for a time Angel was joined by another Irish wolfhound, Stormy Girl. She was diagnosed with melanoma and passed away at age five.

When our daughter’s heart was ready for another dog, she saw an ad in the Seattle Times for a “golden retriever, a great family dog.” When she and Colt went to pick Snowflake up at a place near Longview, they learned she was a seven year-old puppy-mill mommy who had spent her entire life in a wooden shed.

The first day they had her, they planned to spend the night in Cannon Beach. As soon as the car door opened, Snowflake bolted. Colt was still a toddler. Jeanne T. had to leave him with the hotel desk clerk while she and a Cannon Beach cop tracked down and eventually recaptured the terrified animal.

Once they got back home, Jeanne T. discovered that Snowflake’s hindquarters were so weak that she could barely walk on the hardwood floors. She was spooked by everything, including hairspray and flushing toilets.

For rescued dogs, the Academy will do a week-long free assessment to see if an animal is suitable for adoption into a family home. Less than 36 hours after picking Snowflake up in Longview, Jeanne T. dropped her off at the Academy for an adoption evaluation.

After a week, Jeanne T. called to see how Snowflake was doing. “She’s completely shut down,” the trainer told her. “She needs another week.” The same thing happened after week two. After week three, Jeanne T. finally went to see her. She was seated in the lobby waiting when the trainer led the dog into the room. Snowflake immediately walked over to Jeanne T. and climbed up into her lap.

“How long did you have her before you brought her here?” the trainer asked. “Thirty-six hours,” Jeanne T. answered. “Clearly she’s YOUR dog!” the trainer said.

Snowflake and later another rescue named Apollo were Colt’s companions during his time in solitary confinement while the pandemic lockdowns were in place.

One last Academy story. When Bill and I took in Bella, she didn’t know any of the commands all our other dogs had learned at the Academy. For her, we were speaking a foreign language. In a less than two week stay, the Academy was able to bring her on board.

So yes, when I mention the Academy for Canine Behavior in my fiction, I have all kinds of reasons—wonderful dog reasons—for doing so.

This reply has become far longer than I expected, because partway in I realized that this really will be food for another blog. But for skittish or ill-behaved dogs, the Academy for Canine Behavior really is the answer.