The stair master (mistress?)

It stands to reason that a dog who has lived their entire life outside in a tractor-trailer park probably hasn't encountered stairs before. This, believe it or not, never actually occurred to us until we headed downstairs to watch TV shortly after bringing Bella home and realized she had no idea of what to do with them. She stood at the top of the stairs doing a little dance, wanting to be with us but absolutely baffled about how to maneuver the long, scary drop in front of her.

She was small enough back then that we were able to pick her up and bring her downstairs with us, and she was pretty quick figuring out how to get back up, but that option was only going to last us so long. We thought she just needed some encouragement to go down but sitting on the top steps with treats garnered only a wary peek around the corner at the "abyss". Stepping off into the unknown just wasn't going to happen. After a few unsuccessful attempts to coax her down the whole staircase, it was time to brainstorm an alternate plan. We began carrying her most of the way and putting her on one of the bottom steps. Oh hey, look, that worked. A dozen or so trips down the stairs to plop her an ever-increasing distance from the bottom and finally, one day, she just did it. I wasn't watching at that exact moment but I heard some noise and then a single bark. Wait, what? I went over to the stairs and there was Bella at the bottom looking up at me just as proud as could be. Lots of "Good girl!"s and "Yay Bella!"s brought her scampering back up the stairs before she promptly ran back down again. And then back up. And down again. And up. And down.

12 times. Yes, 12. (I counted.)

It's almost impossible to describe how it felt to watch her do this - conquering something which had so frightened her. She absolutely beamed with her new-found courage.

It was an early lesson about "training" a scaredy-dog: every behavior, every "trick", every lesson starts three steps before what they tell you in the books. Before you can teach a scaredy-dog to come, you need to teach her to trust. Before you can teach her to jump, you need to teach her the pole won't be used as a weapon. Before she can tackle the staircase, she needs to tackle a step. And before you give up on her, you need to look in at yourself.