00:00The world was just so scary for him.
00:10The first time we met Bale, we were visiting the shelter and they told us that he had been
00:15abandoned in the desert.
00:16The early days with Bale were pretty chill until one day we just lost it.
00:23We realized Bale was reactive to pretty much everything.
00:29He was terrified of people.
00:30He would get spooked by dogs, noises, inanimate objects.
00:38Literally anything that was new or he hadn't seen before, he was terrified of it.
00:42We got a trainer involved and she just said that he had fear reactivity because he hadn't
00:48been socialized properly.
00:51To help him kind of overcome this reactivity and fear of new people specifically, we decided
00:58that we were going to muzzle train him.
01:01So we started to introduce him to people when there were other dogs around.
01:12He also realized that he was fine with people if they had a dog.
01:15And once we learned that, it just changed everything.
01:19Eventually we realized if there's a dog there, it's no problem.
01:23So we haven't needed to use the muzzle recently.
01:25We have made so much progress.
01:28And now he has like 40 friends.
01:35This year we're going to move country and we're leaving the community that we've built
01:40here.
01:41We threw a party for Bale so that he could say bye to all of his friends, dogs, and friends
01:46because they have helped us so much.
01:51It has been amazing to have people here.
01:54We would literally drop anything to help Bale.
02:12I think the main thing that made me not want to give up was creating the Instagram.
02:16I would get people messaging me like, oh, we're going through the same thing.
02:20It's your best friends.
02:22And then I could see other people literally making progress with their dog.
02:26And I was like, you know what, I'm going to start documenting.
02:29I'll look back and I'm like, wow, I forgot he was like that.
02:35When you don't have any other people in your life, you know where you're going, right?
02:40Sometimes it's nice to have strangers on the internet kind of validate that for you.
02:49Hey, good boy.
02:52Good boy.
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