By: Revanche

Pupdate: Seamus and Sera, 2020

March 9, 2020

If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?

Current total: Lakota, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.

Seamus

This pupper continues to be our beloved buddy of many veterinary woes. He’s suffering from moderate arthritis, chronic eye problems, incontinence, and his usual dietary and/or environmental allergies. He’s on a mini-pharmacy of medications to keep him as comfortable as we can: 6 medications.

We’re washing his bedding 2-3 times a week some weeks because his bladder is so unpredictable, so we have to add yet another medication to his pharmacy.

His attitude has backslid quite a bit.  He’s so grouchy when he doesn’t get his way now! He’s also restless randomly at night sometimes, waking us up at 2 or 3 am to go out for a pee. I’m constantly watching him like a hawk for any stumbles, he has taken us by surprise a few times falling on his face or falling over sideways without warning.

Sera

Training her has been a roller coaster of many stomach-twisting drops.

It took us several months just to find a treat that she gave half a hoot about (Beggin Strips of all things) after several months of trying to find anything that she cared enough about to even notice when she saw other dogs. I thought we were on the upswing and then she had an incident where she totally misread the situation thinking a dog was a threat and freaked out.

From that point, she was so reactive, so upset at the mere sight or sound of other dogs that I was straining with my entire body and soul to keep her restrained on our walks. I was a walking stress case, constantly worrying. It didn’t matter if they were barking at her or just running past, she was fearful and that made her aggressive.  Her manners were all shot to hell again, too. She’d meet small humans and leap at them in her excitement.

There was a moment in the past year where I despaired of ever getting her trained well enough to be a Good Dog^TM. I was honestly starting to lose hope.

It was so incredibly frustrating because she was and still is sweet as pie to humans. She still doesn’t love on us, maybe she doesn’t trust us enough yet, but she’s made some minor overtures to liking us. She came and laid next to me this week, resting her head on my shin! That was a first. She adores our friends and she really really likes small cry-things (babies) and she’s just basically bombproof with humans. Nothing about humans scares her. Strange children have run up to her on the sidewalk and held her face without even saying hello first and she stood still for them to say hello. But dogs? Dogs she hasn’t met yet? If they’re loud, even teeny tiny dogs, are perceived as a mortal threat and that is a mess. At first it was just vocal dogs. She’s also not dog aggressive, she wants to be friends with dogs. At the dogsitter, she’s met half a dozen other dogs and she’s been fine with them. She’s in love with Seamus and has made more than one doggy friend. But dogs that start off with barking at her hit that scarred target in her mind and she just could not deal.

After more than 20 years of dog ownership and 6 dogs, I honestly thought we were out of options. I couldn’t get her turned around.

I had a brainstorm one day. I decided to ignore her calorie count and tried feeding her treats like a broken vending machine, doling out great big chunks of delicious Beggin Strips instead of tiny training treats to see if I could keep her attention longer when “safe” dogs were just running past across the street. I’d previously worried that giving her more treats would mean she’d care less about them.

Fool! Why did I think that? The more generously I doled out treats, the more she focused on me. She started voluntarily heeling by me on walks when I couldn’t get her to do it for love or money before, bouncing on her toes, yearning up at me hoping for more of that delicious treat. The Beggin strips ran out too fast, though, she’d gulp them down like a bit of porridge and laser focus on the other dogs again, so I wandered into another theory: what if her treat was really hard and took her longer to eat?

I grabbed some free Milkbones from PetMeds, they always send us one with our order. I gave it to her the next time a rowdy dog vroomed on by, and darn if she didn’t basically ignore that other dog. She glanced up of course but she was too busy crunching on the treat. Her laser focus was broken! I refined that further.

I could ignore her calorie intake when I was desperate but if there’s a chance we CAN rehab her, I have to be mindful of her long term health. We can’t just give her 300+ calories a pop every time we see another dog on a walk, sometimes we see a few and she would inhale a meals’ worth of calories in Milkbones. So now she gets a BITE of the Milkbone in my hand. I can maneuver it into the corner of her mouth so that she bites off a quarter of the Milkbone, enough for her to crunch a few times, and she focuses back on me because I’m still holding the rest of the cookie! Magic! I’ve adjusted her regular diet to account for generous treats as well.

We’ve been doing this for two months and I can finally start to breathe again on walks with her. We even took on the added expense of a weekly dogwalker to help reinforce the training and to give her more exercise. It’s much more reasonably priced compared to scheduling professional trainers. One was charging $300 for 2-3 hour sessions. That was the equivalent of 13-14 weekly walks. In the long run, I think it’s better for her to have those weekly half hours than it would be to have one very long session 2-4 times a year.

The reports are good from the dogwalker, I think she’s walking some other dog some days! But I see Sera’s attitude and attention improving slowly. She still has setbacks but mostly she’s improving, inch by inch. I wish we’d found this solution earlier but we can only work with what we have.

:: Do you think we can have a Good Dog^TM by this time next year? Cross your fingers?

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