Lylah:

Learning to Navigate a Bigger World

Not every comeback begins with a tragedy. Sometimes, it begins with a puppy who simply didn't know how much the world was going to ask of her, and how quickly it would ask.

Lylah was born in September 2023. We specifically searched for a specific breed mix of dog we believed would be a good fit for our family before finding her in Ohio. In February 2024, when Lylah was just six months old, we traveled to Ohio to bring her home to North Carolina. For Lylah, the journey meant ten hours in a car—a car being something she had experienced only once before, during a brief trip to the veterinarian.

Until then, Lylah had known her former family, which included her dog parents, and sibling as well as her human family, and the place where she had grown up.

We arrived to meet her, and while she was excited, she was then placed in a car and driven ten hours away from everything she knew of her world, arriving in North Carolina with a completely new family in an entirely unfamiliar world.

That is a tremendous amount of change for a young, inexperienced, dog.

In the days and weeks that followed, I began to notice Lylah developing significant anxiety around riding in the car. It became one of the first challenges we would have to work through with her.

Through observation, patience, gradual exposure, positive associations, consistency, and time, she was able to learn that getting into a car didn't mean losing everything familiar.

Only two weeks after coming home with us, Lylah experienced something she was even less prepared to understand.

She was attacked. She thankfully was not injured in anyway. We were walking in our neighborhood when an unleashed, unrestrained dog attacked Lylah, Jelly, Enola, and Basha. At only six months old, Lylah had never experienced dog aggression. She seemed genuinely confused by what was happening.

When our older dogs dropped to their bellies to protect themselves, Lylah didn't know what to do. She simply remained standing. She was a puppy who had no understanding of why another dog was trying to hurt her.

After the attack, Lylah's association of other dogs changed. She was a six-month-old puppy suddenly encountering something she had no developmental experience or framework to understand. What had once been something she simply encountered on walks became something she had learned to watch for. Something to remain alert for. The attack left her unsure of what to expect when another dog appeared. She began to anticipate that all dogs were coming for her.

I knew we needed to work with her quickly. She was working through her anxieties in the car, but now we had another issue to contend with. Lylah was still growing, and I knew she would become a large, powerful dog. Her size, combined with fear and uncertainty around other dogs, meant that simply hoping she would "grow out of it" wasn't an option.

During her first year with us, dropping our daughter off at school became another source of intense stress for her. Although they had not formed a particularly close bond at the time, Lylah seemed to associate our daughter with the previous owner’s daughter of a similar age, that she had left behind when she came to us from Ohio.

Every morning when our daughter got out of the car, Lylah would panic—pacing back and forth, trying to get through the window, and seeming desperate to get our daughter back into the car. We couldn't know exactly what Lylah was thinking, but the pattern and association was striking.

Interestingly, Lylah’s relationship with our own daughter has changed with time. Now, as Lylah approaches her third year and has become calmer and more settled, our daughter is forming a much deeper bond with her. It has been a reminder that relationships don't always happen on our timetable. Sometimes, they develop when both sides of a relationship are finally ready for them.

But Lylah's newly learned behavior, presenting as dog reactivity offered us an additional challenge, when it became to our neighbors dog.

Our neighbor's Husky/German Shepherd mix would repeatedly rush the fence whenever Lylah passed on her way back from the potty lot. He would slink through his yard, stalking, watching, and waiting for Lylah to return, then suddenly charge the fence as though he intended to attack her. As best as I can tell, he never intended to hurt her, he never barked, he never bit at her, he never tried to hurt her, but…she didn’t know that he wasn’t going to.

We couldn't change that dog's behavior.

We could, however, help Lylah change how she responded to it. And that was incredibly difficult.

Lylah is a large, powerful, working dog with strong guardian instincts woven into the mix of breeds she is. She began anticipating the fence rush. When the other dog charged, Lylah would grab the chain-link fence that made up the potty area in our yard, and with her teeth, she’d try to tear through it.

During one particularly intense episode, I attempted to get a hold of her collar to leash her, before heading back into the house, and she redirected her response. She bit my arm.

While most would see this as Lylah attacking me, she wasn’t. She never even saw me, she saw the dog that was coming for her. She was over threshold, meaning, she only saw that dog and was attempting to protect herself. She had no way of knowing it was me, getting her collar. Her intention was never to bite me. There wasn’t anything personal in the interaction, so I never saw Lylah’s bite as Lylah being "bad."

I saw a young dog who had been repeatedly placed in situations she found frightening, and threatening. I saw a dog who had not yet learned another way to respond.

So we kept working.

Month after month, through training, structured walks, consistency, and patience, Lylah began learning that she didn't have to meet every perceived threat with a defensive response.

Slowly, she became calmer.

She began learning that she could look to me for guidance instead of taking everything into her own “paws” or teeth.

She didn't need to become less of who she was. She needed to learn how to use who she was in a different way. The breed mix she is, she will still always be protective. That’s just in her genetic makeup. To ask her to do differently, would be to ask her to be a different breed of dog and that’s not possible.

I am still Lylah's person—she follows me from room to room—but she has also developed a significant bond with my husband as well. His calm nature and steady presence have given Lylah another kind of teacher. From him, she has learned something particularly important: steadfastness.

Sometimes, nothing needs to happen. That is her training. Meaning, she does nothing. She can simply be present, observe, and trust that everything is going to be okay.

Today, Lylah is three years old and has a much greater understanding of the world around her. She has learned to look to us. She has learned that not every dog is a threat. She has learned that she has choices. She’s still learning to make the correct choices.

Our neighbors eventually moved away, and while we were sad to see people we loved leave, we were grateful for the journey their presence—and the challenges it created—gave Lylah.

Since then, Lylah has met our new canine neighbor.

While that meeting instigated a lot of barking, the meeting was done with the fence between both dogs, and they were only about 2 feet apart. That had never have happened with our former neighbors dog, (for obvious safety reasons for both dogs).

Since six months old, Lylah has experienced growth, and the next introduction went better than I could have hoped for.

A new dog. A new opportunity. A new beginning.

That's Lylah's ComeBack.