The Katzke Dog Diary

With dogs with dysplasia or who are recovering from dysplasia surgery, one of the best therapies you can do is water therapy. Walking the dog in water for the extra resistance, letting the dog swim for the exercise and to take the weight off of their hips for a while, and generally getting the dog to use their injured legs in ways that don’t create impact injuries.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a swimming pool and can’t really afford to put one in at a rental house. And then there’s maintaining a pool to human standards, the extra insurance, and the fences and alarms that my city requires be installed around any swimming pool.

I could just use plastic kiddie pools, but I tried that before. They chewed up two of them ($25 each) last year.

Solution: a 300 gallon, $200 stock tank meant for watering livestock. I’m calling it the “redneck hot tub” …

Eowyn had her hips operated on two months ago (just in time for Christmas, lucky her…) and then spent five weeks on crate rest before I allowed her to move around again.

Right now, she still has some pain when she moves, but she’s been up and around and walking for three weeks. I’ve noticed a marked decrease in reactive behavior. She’s still very food/resource aggressive, but she doesn’t snap all the way to aggression like she used to… she now very noticeably warns before she bites. She doesn’t display much (if any) aggression towards cars anymore on our walks … this is a very recent development, but I’ve been doing everything I can to encourage it!

Also, the “interrupts” that I tried to train into her last year now suddenly work. Telling her to “come” or “down” will now result in her coming or laying down, instead of continuing whatever reaction she was in the middle of. Turns out it wasn’t so much that the behavior specialist I saw (Dr. Kay Stephens of Puppy Love in College Station) was wrong in how to train her, it’s that she was wrong in her evaluation of why Eowyn was reacting the way she was.

And here I’m just happy to have my puppy back!

It’s been a month and change now since Eo’s last hip surgery. With the wonderfully warm weather that we’ve had this weekend, I decided to take her off the Tramadol (painkiller, opiate) that she’s been on since the surgery. She seems to still get around fine, and the pretty consistent movement as I’ve worked in the garden has helped her greatly. She’s not back to 100% yet, of course, but for seven weeks post-op she sure isn’t doing bad.

Eo was so helpful this weekend when I was potting plants.

By the way, I should point out again for people who don’t know me — I’m not a vet, but I’m very involved with my dogs’ medical care and I know as much as possible about the different drugs, treatments, needs, and the background to the behavioral modifications we’re trying to make. Don’t take anything I say about medicine or veterinary stuff as gospel.

One thing that’s apparent is that a month of inactivity leading up to the surgery and a month of inactivity recovering from the surgery has left her with some remarkable atrophy in her rear legs. Her favorite position is sitting down with most of her weight on her front legs; she’s built like a bodybuilder on the front half but has nothing but loose bone and sinew on the rear. We’ve been walking nightly in an effort to rebuild this, but haven’t been putting any serious distance on. This weekend, I started working in the yard on my garden, and I’ve been letting her pick how much she moves and putting her away when she gets crabby or frantic.

The other thing that’s been rather obvious since the surgery is that she’s MUCH less crabby. She hasn’t gone after Henry with the intent to cause serious harm in a while. (Yes, this used to be a big problem. And it’s the reason she was inactive for a month before the surgery and the reason we did it so soon after the first one.) To Henry’s credit, he’s learned how not to provoke her, and he’s even been initiating play recently by bowing and pawing at her — she’s seemed to enjoy playing with him when she’s in the mood, but I’ve been stopping it before it’s really gotten “started” in puppy terms because I know that she’ll hurt herself if I don’t.

I haven’t been posting much about her because “Yeah, she’s on crate rest… still on crate rest… in her crate” makes for boring blog entries. It’s nice to have some progress to report. Indications are good that she’ll make a full recovery and will go on to boss everyone around the house for many more years.

A few Doolittler posts about canine hip dysplasia, since we haven’t talked about it in a while —

• Hip dysplasia in dogs: Thoughts on incidence, treatment and prevention
• Hip dysplasia in dogs (part 2): The real cost of diagnosis
• And then this past weekend, 101 PennHIP vs. OFA: Better medicine vs. better marketing — this is mostly for the breeders or purebred fans in the audience, since rescue mutts don’t really need OFA’s!

Eo’s doing fine, by the way, and I’m increasing her mobility a little bit day by day. She’s putting weight on both legs, her incision is nearly healed, and we’re just about to start doing actual PT next week. On the other hand, it’s obvious she’s still not a happy camper — she snapped at Henry for nothing for the first time in a month though, but he’s fine — I got her before she got him.

Eowyn’s second Femoral Head Ostectomy is done, and she’s recovering at Boonville Animal Hospital. The doc called a little while ago to tell me that the surgery went much better this time and she should have an easier recovery. Woohoo! Merry Christmas, Eo. Sorry, I promise that you’ll feel much better soon!

We’ve got two crates in the house for Eowyn, and I’m thinking about adding a third. Each comes with all the modern conveniences — water, a nice soft place to lay down, enough room to turn around in, a Nylabone or two for those immediate chewing needs, and a door that closes and latches.

For a little bit of review, Eowyn has two problems: Dog/Food Aggression, and Hip Dysplasia. The more research, reading, training, and practice I do with Eo, the more I realize that these are very closely connected, intertwined, interlinked, cause-and-effect, systemic issues and NOT discreet behavior problems that can be treated empirically.

There’s currently one in the bedroom, where we all sleep, and in the kitchen next to the table, where we spend most of the rest of our days. She eats in the crate, she naps in the crate while I cook and eat dinner, she’s in the crate when Henry and I are working on obedience… all the usual stuff.

Magically, she has no problems eating in the crate when Henry’s eating his dinner two feet from her. No growling, signs of aggression, stiffness in her posture, whining, barking, or other vocalizing, no lunging and gnashing — nothing. If she is out of the crate and I try to feed him, she will attack him for his food. What’s the difference?

The seat of the pants doggy psychologist in me says that she feels threatened because of her hip pain. She can’t back up a warning (growling, baring teeth) because it’s patently obvious that her hips are bad, so she just attacks without notice. With the crate between her and the other dog, she doesn’t feel like her food supply is threatened. It’s her comfortable place that other dogs don’t go into.

The usual approach from here I guess would be desensitization. I’m wondering if I can’t just AVOID the behavior for now and just not allow her to make any mistakes for now so that she “forgets” the aggressive stuff, and then after her hips are fixed, start working on the actual desensitization work with a chance of it getting results this time…

It’s official. For her Christmas present, Eowyn will be getting her other hip done. I started talking to our vet about two weeks ago about doing it. This morning, we ran down the list of reasons for Eo’s lack of progress with the behavior modification plan, and ended up with hip pain as the last possible cause short of her being untrainable … which we know is not true.

A month ago, we switched Henry’s food and ran him through the parasite wringer again … the result, just one month later, is a dog that shows anxiety but few signs of panic. He will heel off lead, will come on command, will go to the bathroom on command, is my jogging and napping partner, and believe it or not, he no longer snores. The change came and his confidence started building as soon as we fixed his last medical (digestive) issue. After his confidence built up a little bit and he was sure he wasn’t going to rot in a crate all day with no water and no company, he became a new dog.

I have mixed feelings about doing Eo’s other hip so soon after the first. On one hand, I feel like it’s too early. We hadn’t planned on it until May. On the other hand, X-rays show that the head of her right femur continues to degrade and calcify. The pain has to be excruciating. I’m hoping that performing the second FHO (and the ensuing month of bed rest and the reduction in pain) will finally help us get a handle on her reactive behavior.

This is the dumbest excuse for a blog posting in the world. I was really happy to see Eo scratching her neck today using the leg that we did the FHO for her Hip Dysplasia on. Makes me feel like all of the walking and other stuff that we’ve been doing for months on end may not be a waste after all, even though that leg still looks atrophied and she still favors the other!

I’m back from my travels, and Eowyn’s back from 10 days at the boarding kennel. I boarded her at the same vet that did the surgery, and they did a better job than I did at keeping her mostly immobile — but that means she’s lost a serious amount of muscle mass.

Since she doesn’t seem to be in any pain per say (just not willing to trust that leg — rightly so, as it’s all bone and tendon after not bearing any weight for five weeks!), I’ve started walking her again for very short walks in the morning and evening. The exercise has been good or her and being outside for a bit has calmed her down so that I can actually get some work done at night!

Eo’s main problem with this surgery is that she’s been licking a certain part of it, to the point where the dissolving sutures have given out and the wound almost got infected. The lampshade-style collars have been useless — she either figures out a way around it, or figures out how to get it off … methods for the latter include destroying it and tearing it into little pieces so that it can never be worn again.

But I finally managed to beat her drive to lick! It only took me two weeks to outsmart my dog.

Step 1- Get a “nonstick dressing for covering wounds” from your local pharmacy or grocery store. The pads I had on hand were about 2 inches by 3 inches. Step 2- Attach it to the dog. I used white medical tape. It doesn’t stick too well, but well enough for our purposes – we’re not trying to seal it off, we’re just trying to cover it. Step 3 – Spray the outside of the bandage with Grannick’s Bitter Apple. It’s a spray solution that I imagine tastes and smells horrible to a dog .. I can’t smell it, though, so I don’t mind! Be careful not to get any Bitter Apple in the wound itself or in the dog’s nose or eyes.

So far she’s left it alone. I’m sure if I put her in her kennel the smell would drive her nuts and she’d tear it off out of frustration, but in the meantime we’re good to go. And hopefully a few days of keeping this covered and smelling/tasting horrible will finally allow things to close up.