Erin Keltz and her husband, Todd Smith, realized they had room for a dog.
They just purchased their first home in early 2019. Erin had grown up with dogs. “I’d always had dogs,” she explained. “I felt like I wanted a little friend around.”
Todd had always wanted to adopt a pitbull, so they narrowed their search to pitbull rescues. “I had no preference,” Erin said. “I could adopt any kind of dog.”
When Petals’ picture popped up on the Philly Bully Team Instagram page, they knew she was the one. “She looked really cute,” Erin shared. “I always wanted a relatively young dog because we had a cat at the time who had been an only cat for about nine to ten years and he was very set in his ways. We wanted a puppy who would adapt to him.”
They named her Petunia P. Pittingsworth, or Petals for short.
She was only four months old and had been with a foster home that had cats. “When she got here, she really wanted to be friends with our cat and he was not having it,” Erin said. “He was a bit of a bully, but she tried to make friends every time she saw him. Unfortunately, he passed away in August of 2020. We just recently adopted a kitten, and again, Petals is really interested. But she is a lot of dog. She’s got a big personality. She’s very rambunctious. Our new kitten is just a little bit scared of her. We’re working on them being best friends.”
They started training one month after bringing her home in July of 2019. They’d started with a training company in Center City for puppy classes. “She was uncontrollable,” Erin said. “She wouldn’t listen to us, and all she wanted to do was get to the other dogs. I wasn’t sure what she would do when she got to the other dogs because she was acting almost aggressive. She was biting us and barking and growling at the other dogs. It was very upsetting. She had been such a sweetheart before that—a little rambunctious and naughty, but that was all to be expected for a four-month-old puppy.”
They were kicked out of the class. Erin decided to find a trainer who specialized in bully breeds, and a Google search brought her to Nicole Skeehan, the owner of Philly Unleashed. Nicole had experience working with bully breeds with challenging pasts. “We didn’t know our dog’s background,” Erin shared. “I don’t think she came from a bad background, but we didn’t know anything about it. I explained to Nicole that we were having real difficulties with our dog and asked if she’d be willing to take us on. We started out with a lot of one-on-one lessons with Nicole. We also took classes and sent her to Farmcamp.”
After the pandemic hit, they joined in outdoor classes at the farm, as well. More recently, they’ve been training with Petals to help her with her fear of one particular set of stairs at the house. “They’ve been great with her,” Erin said of the Philly Unleashed staff. “She’s taken plenty of lessons and she’s had some classes out there. We’ve had a trainer out to the house to help her. They’re all so great with her, which is awesome.”
But it was a journey to get there. They’d been training regularly since she arrived home. She visited Farmcamp several times. But she was getting into scuffles regularly at the dog park, and they had to stop going. Then she was kicked out of doggy daycare. And she was a struggle on walks and at home. “If she saw other dogs on a walk, it would sometimes turn into a scuffle,” Erin explained. “My husband and I were very close to having to give her back to the rescue. I didn’t want to do that because she had already become part of our family, and if someone like me, who was putting in all of this effort, couldn’t do it, not many other people could. I worried that she would end up bouncing back and forth between homes and the rescue.”
They ended up talking to their vet, who prescribed Prozac. “Within two weeks, she was almost a different dog,” Erin explained. “I’m not saying everyone should medicate their dog. Our dog is definitely a unique case and we did this as a last resort. She’s a very anxious dog and sometimes you see a different dog take over her eyes. There’s just no snapping her out of it. With the Prozac, now she’s more likely to listen to us. She doesn’t get so manic and anxious, so that really helped with our training. That’s when we turned a corner. And that’s when she was really able to start picking up a lot of the stuff the trainers at Philly Unleashed had been teaching her and we had been reinforcing at home. She’s such a smart dog and sometimes I think she’s too smart for her own good.”
Now, it’s not as challenging to redirect her or help her focus. And her relationship with her people has changed. “I would say where it’s really helped the most with the relationship between my husband and her,” Erin shared. “My husband had given up. He’d written her off. He thought our only option was to give her back to the rescue.”
Todd has become her biggest cheerleader. “My husband is now obsessed with her,” Erin said. “She’s not the most well-behaved, but she’s much more well-behaved than she was. He can’t imagine his life without her.”
Petals brings a lot to their family. “She’s really quirky,” Erin said. “We live in a rowhome in the city so we don’t have a lot of outdoor space for her to run around.”
They bring her to a nearby fenced-in park and let her off the leash when there’s no one else around. “She just loves to run,” Erin shared. “It’s almost like her back end is so much faster than her front that it starts scooching up underneath her. She looks like a cartoon character when she’s running. She just loves racing around and having fun.”
And she’s a big goof. “She loves the hose,” Erin said. “When we hose down the back patio, she does almost anything to get out back with us to play with the hose. But she hates the rain, which I don’t understand. And, she’s our little guard dog. In our living room, we have a really long bay window with a deep windowsill. She loves to prop her elbows up on the windowsill to survey the neighborhood. I got special cushions made for the sill so she won’t have to rest her elbows on the wood. She’s our neighborhood watch, like a Nosy Nelly spying on the neighbors.”
Erin advises other dog owners facing similar issues to not give up. “Had we given up, we wouldn’t have her,” Erin shared. “She makes our family complete. She’s just fun to have around and she’s just such a great companion. Don’t give up because, in the end, it’s worth it.”
