Apologies for no posts over the holiday; Managing four dogs instead of two can be just a touch tiring.
Basil and Henry:
(Basil is a Lowchen, and it’s traditional to shave their hindquarters and legs for show/conformation purposes.)
That’s Mouse, a ~150 lbs Greater Swiss Mountain Dog.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
For those keeping track at home, Henry had one of the world’s worst case of separation anxiety — we’re counting two destroyed crates and damage to a third, damage to the house when he escaped from the crate or was left out, and physical damage done to himself during escape attempts.
At my veterinarian’s recommendation, we had him on about 48mg daily of Reconcile, which is Fluoxetine Hcl (same as Proazac) and a behavior modification program that involved desensitization and making his kennel his happy go-to place. This is completely standard and is easy to enforce. From there, it just has taken time for him to become more comfortable in his new life.
We reached another giant milestone today. I was gone from 8:30am until 1 and then until 6:30 at night — and not only did he not pace and drool, but his tendency to wet his kennel (stress urination) didn’t happen! Except for his usual “run around in circles” when I got home, he didn’t display ANY signs of undue stress or anxiety and wasn’t even breathing hard when I came into the room to let the kids out of their crates!
Henry went through four distinct phases over the past few months.
The first phase was completely insane hyperactive panic attacks whenever I left the house — especially if I took Eowyn with me. He would try anything and everything to escape and follow us, up to and including pulling the welds of a metal crate apart, chewing through plastic, bending wires, and figuring out how to manipulate catches. Once he was loose in the house, he’d try to chew through the windows, doors, and window and door frames. We started the reconcile after the first two crates got chewed through. It helped a lot, but definitely isn’t 100% of the solution.
The second phase was drooling and pacing the entire time I was absent. Again, this is indicative of an incredible amount of stress. I worked on this when we were home by randomly having one or both of them go into their kennels, rewarding them (esp. with a treat inside the kennel already so that they don’t associate it with me — peanut butter kongs for the win!) and letting them be for a while.
The third phase that was a real pill was the heavy drinking phase. No, not beer. Henry would re-enter the panic state if his water bowl got emptied. Considering that I didn’t want to OVER-water either of them and have them go to the bathroom in their crates, I had limited both of their water during the day to a quart. Henry would immediately drink this and then panic when it was empty. (At this point, I was monitoring them with a webcam.) I “solved” this by buying a gallon(!) bucket and double-ended D-clip and hanging the entire gallon of water in his crate.
This, of course, brought about the fourth phase — wetting the kennel. I didn’t realize it for a few days because of the history of pacing/drooling, and he’s a typical sloppy hound drinker, but Henry was consistently peeing in his kennel in the afternoons every day even though I was arriving home at a regular time each day. He’s SO well potty trained that I was 99% it was connected to the anxiety. (He’s had one accident in the house with bloody diarrhea, and when he couldn’t wake me up, he pooped in the far front corner of the house as far from the ‘den’/bedroom as possible and on easily cleanable laminate flooring. I removed the soft items from his kennel (towels/pad, soft toys) and left only easily sanitize-able kongs and nylabones plus a smaller water dish and his food bowl in the crate during the day, and after two weeks of consistently wetting, I *think* he finally didn’t today! It must’ve been the long walk we took at lunch and a couple opportunities to go to the bathroom along the way.
I think the big hurdle was first providing enough water so that he could get past the “I’m going to be dehydrated” thing, and then solving his food issues at the same time. With his history of intestinal problems, I switched him from the Innova Adult (which is otherwise an excellent food that I highly recommend) to Wellness Simple, which has a few different varieties that have only five or six ingredients and very little overlap between the ingredients… that way if one variety doesn’t work, you can always try others. He immediately stopped scratching at his sides with his hind leg and his stool firmed up to solid for the first time.
If you’re facing the same type of situation I did, whether with your dog or with a rescue or shelter dog, there’s lots of hope and light at the end of the tunnel. You and your dog will be fine. Just continue treating the dog with dignity, respect (without coddling), and address any concrete health issues or definitive psychological issues that come up as quickly and completely as possible. Separation anxiety *can* be managed! And what a difference it makes in a dog’s life to not be so worried all the time!
Eo and Henry are going to love this weekend — Mouse and Basil (Respectively: 150 lbs Swiss Mountain Dog, 2x Eo’s size, and 15 lbs floor mop Laochen who rules the house) are coming to stay with us over Thanksgiving.
I’ve been remiss in updating recently. Work is busy with a vengeance, and I’m stretched a bit thin.
Henry and Eo are doing pretty well, all things considered. We’ve gone two weeks now without Eo reacting negatively to Henry. As I posted below about the Wellness Simple food, Henry’s stomach is on the mend and he’s happily filling my backyard with little solid logs of poo.
Eo’s doing OK, but I had to push her Rimadyl dose up. I may have to up it again. We’re probably headed back to surgery within a month or two. I’m trying to figure out how to schedule it around any traveling I was planning to do to see relatives at Christmas — Eo may spend Christmas at the vet’s having her other hip done. Not fun. But patently better than the grinding I can feel through her skin over her right hip.
One of Eo’s main problems that I’m trying to get a handle on is her reactivity to Henry in certain situations, like when he enters a room or is laying in a spot she likes. He’ll happily defer to her. If — and that’s a very large if — she lets him before she attacks. She doesn’t draw blood in the attack, but she sounds terrifying, definitely pinches and grabs tufts of fur, and he is definitely and appropriately terrified of her. I think I’ve finally gotten the message through her thick skull that reacting that way is NOT appropriate behavior by combining positive control (aka: “Don’t let it happen!”) with positive reinforcement.
You can take the business process analyst out of the factory, but you can’t always take the factory out of the business process analyst. It helps me to track data about her behavior — for example, how long it’s been since she acted aggressively towards Henry. We now have a “Days Since a Lost Fur Incident” sign on the fridge. Every day she goes without acting aggressive, I get to stick another Post-It with a higher number on it.
We were up to six days this week until Henry sniffed at a Kong that Eo wasn’t quite done with. She didn’t actually manage to get to him (I stopped her and put her in a down-stay) but he yelped in fear and ran under the table — and I dutifully reset the clock to 0. One of these days I’ll get a week of peace.
I feel like a complete dork for making this post, but — Henry, for the first time in at least three months and probably a year, has had consistently solid stool for three days running. What did it? I switched him from Innova Adult to Wellness Simple Venison and Rice … I think he thought it was bland at first, but the difference was immediate and obvious.
Also, he stayed in his crate quietly for an entire 8 hour workday today. Talk about a day of accomplishments for him… and one hell of a lot of relief for me.
One of my new favorite Flickr posters is Julie.Anna, and she posted an AMAZING set of photos of some of her curs at work. This is what Henry’s breed was intended for — hunting, herding, and controlling wildlife on the Texas frontier.
All of the photos are linked to the full res size in her flickr gallery, and I suggest clicking through — the clarity, sharpness, and timing of the photos is amazing.
Fruitables were developed by a clinician/nutritionist at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine, and I was given a couple of samples by a friend. I’m happy to report that the kids loved them to a tail-wagging extreme.
When looking at training treats, there’s three things I look at. The first is ingredients and caloric content. (Pupperoni? Bad. Our usual 100% dried chicken chips / cheap lunch meat? Good.) The second is smell. The smell of the treat has to be SUPER DUPER so that the kids will want them even when they can’t see them. Remember, I’m training a couple of dogs that are mixed hounds at best and exclusively sighthound at worst. The final thing is portability. This is where the wonderful cheap lunch meat, which is usually well-regarded, fails — it’s hard to separate the pieces, it’s hard to control how much I have with me in my training pouch, and if left out or on a long training “exercise” (aka a day at the office for public desensitization / socialization) … well, it’s better if you have a refrigerator, ifyaknowwhatImean.
If you can’t find them at your local pet store yet, you can order them from Amazon.com. There’s several varieties available:
My only wish, which has been communicated back to to Dr. Bauer, is for smaller bits. The 9 calorie cookies are great, but it was too easy to go through them quickly. I ended up (approximately) quartering the cookies for our training session. He responded to my email by saying that they had heard that (and also had found in the process that birds greatly enjoy the treats) and were planning to produce something along those lines in the future.
Cleaning out a few product reviews that I’ve had stacked up in the wings… we’ve made some good progress in training, but I’m busy with some consulting projects at the moment and can’t find time to write it up. While we wait…
I picked up this Delta shower head at Home Depot for $49 last month. Money well spent. It’s winter here in Texas now (for the northerners in the audience — that means it’s 80F during the day and gets down to a bone-chilling mid-50s F during the night) and that means that the dogs get bathed inside because their human’s turned into a wuss.
I’m a little skeptical of the amount of plastic that’s in it’s construction — ok, it’s entirely plastic — but we’ll see how it holds up over time. Our water’s REALLY high in salts and minerals. There’s three inline filter screens, and the main/default water stream comes from little rubberized jets which don’t seem to be susceptible so far to the amazing clogging power of central Texas aquifer water.
On the other hand, the six foot no-kink cord is nice, and it’s very refreshing to be able to rinse the dogs off completely without having to use cups and splashes and then still having their coats be half-full of shampoo when we get out of the shower. It’s also made cleaning the inevitable small mountain of fuzz, mud, and dog hair that builds up on every surface in the shower very, very easy.
If you are a dog owner and you do NOT have this shower head or something similar for bathing the mutts, you really don’t know what you’re missing.
It’s a bit of a thick read and I suggest using an outlining tool or pad of paper to keep track as you read through it, but the FDA’s animal feed labeling requirements is a fascinating look into the world of the highly processed food industry.