The Katzke Dog Diary

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*

The dogs have an amazing ability to stick to a schedule. It’s like they both have little alarm clocks in their heads, and as soon as the clock ticks over to 7am — bounce! Up they go, ready for whatever the day may bring. As soon as the clock ticks past 10pm, Henry starts sawing logs at an obnoxious volume and Eo will sit and stare at me until I put her to bed.

To me, the natural rythms of the dogs’ needs are one of the best associated benefits of dog ownership. To fulfill their own needs, the mutts enforce a schedule on me. My natural tendency is to get up somewhere around noon and go to bed whenever my eyelids get too heavy to support conscious thought. This isn’t the best schedule for a number of reasons. It keeps me from going to work on time and going to bed in time to wake up rested.

As soon as the sun comes up, the dogs are ready for breakfast… which leads me to get up and eat too. As soon as the sun goes down, they’re whining and putting their heads in my lap for dinner… which leads me to notice that maybe I should feed myself. Bedtime isn’t an abstract concept, it’s bedtime, with all three of us curled up in various corners of the bedroom. It’s another reinforcement of the symbiotic nature of the relationship between dog and human.

I made a post on my tech/personal blog about my techie and personal goals for 2009, but it’s time I sit down and take a hard look at what I want to do with the dogs.

Henry unexpectedly came into my life in July, and has been the bane of my pocketbook and social life ever since. On the other hand, he’s been such a rewarding personal experience that I’m loath to quit while I’m ahead — and I refuse to dump my problems on someone else. Henry’s goals for 2009 are:

1. Start trailing off of the prozac. At my vet’s directions, he’s on a 1.5x dose of Reconcile right now. I can get generic prozac in 20mg capsules for much cheaper than the Reconcile, but since he’s on about 52mg a day right now and attempts to back that off have not met with great success, I need to wait a little bit on it.
2. Build his confidence with obedience training. This is in progress and going well, thanks to Jennie. We’re working on retrieval right now.
3. Build his confidence by exposing him to new social situations. This is meeting with mixed, but mostly positive results. He will happily enter elevators now, and he can walk through a lobby full of students on campus without flinching. I’d like to expand the number and level of social interactions that he’s comfortable with.
4. Decide if I’m going to keep him or adopt him out. A lot of this decision depends on how well Eowyn does, because if she’s still in pain after the FHO recovery, then I need to put her down for her sake and I’d prefer to still have Henry at that point.

Eowyn turned 2 this past year, and she also had both hips operated on. After her rehabilitation period this year, we’ll hopefully be able to start training out some of the dog and food aggression that she’s picked up along the way. Experimentation with painkillers has shown that her tendency towards aggression drops markedly when she’s not in pain. (Go figure.) My goals for her this year are:

1. Finish her recovery from the FHO following the crate rest and physical therapy guidelines.
2. Get a solid and immediate ‘down’ command trained in that I can use to redirect any time she gets into an aggressive pattern.
3. Start redirecting her aggression using the ‘down’ command.

Here’s to a happy new year for you and yours!

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…

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.

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.

Go watch these videos at SmartDogs! Man, if that happened at the dog park I used to take Eo (who, as a Rhodesian Ridgeback mix, is descended from african dogs — although a different breed) there’d be owners running everywhere, (human) tears, and lots of bruised (human) egos. I don’t do dog parks much anymore.

As I was watching these videos and typing this, Eowyn (the huntress) disemboweled another Bad Cuz. I had to give her something to chew on because she was hunting for more geckos to hunt after she caught one that slipped in under the back door. Henry is cowering in mortal fear underneath the kitchen table as she tosses the Cuz around. After she’s torn the squeaker out and crunched it into tiny plastic pieces, she runs throughout the entire house biting down on it and then plugging the hole with her tongue. Note to self: Dog likes sucking chest wounds. Do not piss dog off.

You never know what you might learn. In this case, It’s a fascinating little bit over at One Bark at a Time about alarm pheremones and dog reactions with the link to the original article at Ars Technica in the first paragraph. Now that, that’s just plain ol’ fascinating and it points out yet again why having control over your dog’s level of arousal is so important in social interactions. Oh, and I found One Bark at a Time via Caveat.

I wonder if there’s an “antidote” to this fear pheremone that can be sprayed in high stress areas like kennels and shelters to subdue anxious dogs? I mean, one that works on a scientific basis, as opposed to the snake oil misters that are currently on the market.

You know, I don’t know if I’ve seen this in any of the books I’ve read recently, but I’ve been experimenting with lots of LITTLE training sessions. Eowyn needs work on her food aggression, reactivity, and resource guarding. Henry needs work on his anxiety and is, unfortunately, picking up Eowyn’s reactivity. Every book I’ve managed to beg, borrow, or steal on the subject stresses over and over not to make training sessions longer than 10 minutes and not to allow the dog to get bored… but they dont mention how much time should be between sessions.

I’m mowing the lawn right now. Eo’s in the backyard, and every time she doesn’t react to a dog or bicycle going by she gets a treat. Henry’s inside while I mow in his crate, and every 5-10 minutes I’ll come in and give him a treat. Before I went outside, Eo and I did a ‘attentiveness’ clicker training session in front of the big front picture window.

It’s kind of like my day to day need to get back into shape. Instead of joining a gym, I started walking miles and miles with the dogs every night. Every now and then at work when I get bored or frustrated I’ll stop and go up and down a few flights of stairs, or I’ll drop and give myself 20 pushups. Much better to integrate the physical and emotional training into life than it is to make a special time with other artificial constraints.