Omar (RIP)
Omar wasa Central Asian Ovcharka who passed away at age 11 in mid-2022 1o-years-old. He stood over 32″ tall and weighed in at a whopping 185lb (scale weight). He was the perfect example of this breed not being the dog for the average pet owner. His family purchased him as a pup sight unseen from an East Coast breeder and had no clue what they were getting into. They had not done their homework on the breed. He grew up believing that he needed to protect his family from everything and everybody, and thus became a liability when he started to protect his own family from their friends inside their own home. He came to us when the family was going through a divorce, neither side wanted him, and he was heading for a boarding kennel until the money ran out, then if a home couldn’t be found in a month (which was unlikely) he had a date with the needle. Some Ovcharka rescuers back east made arrangements for him to come to WhiteFire Great Pyrenees for evaluation while transportation arraignments and an eastern foster home could be set up. When Silk Road Rescue was formed shortly after that (partly due to him), Omar was brought into that program while still remaining at his foster home.
When Omar arrived, it was immediately obvious that he could not be safely transported anywhere and nor could he be safely fostered by anyone not set up for a dog of his size and protectiveness/reactivity. It took us 3 days just to be able to get inside his kennel and several weeks before he would accept every human on the property safely. We have been using the Low Stress Handling® techniques of Dr. Sophia Yin to socialize him and get him to where he could be a good member of a household, while still not losing the nature of the breed and he made amazing progress, to the point that he became a house dog again. The intent had been to socialize him to the point he could be adopted but several factors slowed that process, he became too old to place (he was not 100% safe with new visitors except in controlled conditions), and it wouldn’t be fair to move him as he had made himself a job and a home. He was buried here next to Rafa, Tatiana and Bobo.
We will miss him greatly. You can see his obituary at https://www.facebook.com/SilkRoadRescue
