The great ambassador
Volunteering, meet-and-greets, joining a church: all of those might work when trying to meet people and become ensconced in a new community.
The best way for me to meet folks and get involved in my new home area, though, seems to be the simple act of walking through the neighborhood every day with a big, fluffy, engaging and uncommonly striking/ handsome dog.
Our Australian shepherd, Shea, lives to meet people, and he has become an ambassador for his family in our new neighborhood. Shea is a people dog. While he worships Bobby, his tiny, elderly canine home companion, he doesn’t care for most other dogs.
With people, though, he only has unabashed love. When we’re out walking and someone ignores him or looks at him and keeps walking, he appears to think, “Hey, it’s me, Shea! Don’t you want a big Shea hug just like everyone else?”
When people do greet Shea, he is giddy with joy. Shea looks like a small bear, and he wiggles his entire bear-like body with excitement every time someone wants to pet him and or even addresses him. I tell folks we encounter on the walks, “If you talk to him, you have to pet him. That’s the deal he thinks he has with the world.” And when he does go up to greet people, he usually goes in for a quick embrace, then turns his back to the person and sits at the person’s feet, leaning on the person’s legs and looking up at the human adoringly.
Almost everyone he meets is charmed by Shea’s uncommon charms. Regulars who greet him on the walks now know and love the quick turn and the snuggling around the legs, followed by the look up of love. It’s become his trademark move.
If Shea were a person, he would be a great Walmart greeter, a peerless politician, a consummate community organizer. We’ve thought of making him a therapy dog who goes to hospitals and rehab facilities to cheer up patients. Shea, being Shea, also would work on cheering up the staff, the patients’ relatives and anyone he randomly encountered in the parking lot.
The only issue with Shea being a therapy dog is he can be a bit overzealous in distributing his love to humans. He recently started trying to jump up and kiss folks on the mouth, so we worked on stopping that inappropriate action and, we hope, broke him of it … once again.
The strange thing about Shea is Australian shepherds, while known to be uncommonly devoted and loving to their family members, are supposed to reserved – even standoffish – to folks they don’t know well. Shea apparently didn’t get that memo from Australian Shephard Central Command. My previous Aussie, Flynn, was shy yet friendly to strangers, but Shea gushes with love for humanity at all moments.
In the Imperial Valley, where he lived for the first four and a half years of his life, folks regularly moved away from Shea as he approached on his leash. He is a robust dog who can get fat if we’re not careful, and his plentiful fur makes him look even bigger than he is. I think he scared many people in Valley, where lots of folks are not accustomed to being around dogs, particularly large dogs.
In Tucson, though, dogs are everywhere, and people are much more amenable to being approached by dogs, even big dogs, they don’t know.
And when that uncommonly handsome dog is wiggling his entire bear body with sheer joy, he’s pretty damn hard to turn away.