Little Lemon Brain
In some ways, training Henry is really difficult. Even after six months of recovery, it’s so easy to trigger a panic attack that you can go straight from the most positive training session in the world to him cowering under the couch in less than a second if you’re not careful.
The things a dog experiences during puppyhood are, to an extent, indelible. It’s not so much that older dogs can’t learn new tricks, it’s that older dogs have to overcome their pasts to learn new things. In Henry’s case, his past is intentional and unintentional abuse.
One of the training exercises we do is designed to teach him patience and watching hands and face for signals. We move a treat slowly from our eyes to his mouth, and if he jumps for the treat we pull it away. We did this exercise in five minute mini-trainings for a few days just fine … and then yesterday, we did it right before dinner and after a walk and all of a sudden his lips start quivering and his head bows down into the “sad Henry” that he acted like when I first rescued him. Checking his heart rate, it was very elevated. Classic case of Henry Panic Attack. This dog’s on so much prozac that he shouldn’t be able to wake up in the morning, much less actually have a panic attack!
It turns out that visitors to the house he lived in used to play “keep away” (intentionally or not) with food, which Henry would try to grab from them … while Henry is quietly starving due to parasites and malnutrition. One of two things would happen — he would be smacked and put back in his crate (hence the fear response), or he would be given some food for laying on the ground and looking REALLY pitiful.
Yeah, that’s going to short-circuit the exercise we were trying to do. *sigh*