THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

On Friday I asked you what you thought was going on here, at least as best one could tell from a still photograph. I’m the first to agree it’s hard to say much from one brief moment in time, but it’s a great exercise nonetheless. It helps us all focus our attention and generate hypothesis about what might happen next. It would be perfectly reasonable to suggest several different scenarios…

Here’s the story in this case: These two dogs are great friends and play together often. The yellow dog is a 4 yr old GR/Husky cross, Tucker, who has a tendency to nip faces when he plays. The white dog in the red coat is Lily, a 2.5 yr old spayed female Dogo Argentino, owned by Katie Martz  here at McC Publishing.

Lily was responding to what appeared to be an inappropriate play action from Tucker (getting into her face in a way both Katie and I would call “rude.”). Katie’s interpretation of the event is that Lily, the Dogo, was irritated by the yellow dog’s behavior and was correcting him.

Immediately after this photo was taken both dogs paused, sniffed the ground and then resumed chasing and playing after a break. I take this as yet more evidence of the importance of pauses in healthy dog play… a chance to take break, take a breath, and decrease arousal levels.

Many of you were absolutely right on in your guess, good for you! (And to one commenter who bravely made a guess even though she was afraid she’d feel foolish if she was wrong… I love that you said out loud what many of us often feel. Good girl!) This is indeed play, as most of you guessed and Lily is, at least in my and Katie’s opinion, telling Tucker to back off. I think the most important visual signals here are the wrinkling over Lily’s nose and exposed front teeth, forward motion toward Tucker along with ears forward. Thus, I’d say she’s on offense and her wrinkled nose suggests some arousal and potential irritation. Tucker’s head is back and lateral, and his ears are back. He thus looks on defense to me, but note his high tail and hips leaning toward Lily… no shrinking violet here. I agree with some of you that he looks a tad surprised, (I want to say goofy but I suspect that’s not a technical term). It’s interesting that most of the responses on FB said the dogs were playing, but some said Tucker was on offense and some said Lily was. Given that the dogs are both pretty equally matched and that Tucker’s tail was high and he could have been hip slamming her at the time, not a bad guess!

Let me know if you think this is a fun exercise to do every once in a while. We could expand it to video… And I’d like to do some case studies here too. Like the idea?

Maybe not a 1,000 in this case, but what words would you put with this photo? What do you think is going on here? I’d love to hear what you all think. I know the dogs, the context and what happened before and after, so after I collect your input I’ll let you in on the story.

This might be a fun exercise for us to play every once in a while, yes? Let me know if you like the idea. I’ll write another post on Monday and describe the dogs, their relationship and what happened immediately after the photo was taken. But before that I’d love to hear how you evaluate what you are seeing.

And no fair cheating if you saw this on Facebook last week! It’s just such a great photo I couldn’t resist putting it out here. So… what’s going on here between these two dogs? What are the most likely things to happen next?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Glorious weather, lots of grass and happy sheep! And happy Willie too, because we’re managing the time to practice our driving skills (or lack thereof).  I’m thinking of entering him in a sheepdog trial this fall that will have a demanding course and difficult sheep, so we have lots of work to do. Tootsie is good too, although she wasn’t a fan of the thunderstorm yesterday morning, but she is already improving greatly with some counter conditioning and cuddles in the bed.

There’s a last chapter in the kitten chronicles too. You may remember that I spent weeks taming the wild things enough to trap them in a cage, took them into the house and began truly taming them in the bathroom converted to a kitty condo. Great homes were found right away for two kittens, and two others went to the good folks at Dane County Friends of Ferals. I kept Callie the Calico in hopes she could grow up to be a healthy, happy barn cat, and that her mother, who I trapped and had spayed, would stay around with her. You may recall I can’t have a cat in the house anymore and have a barn scurrying with rodents, so it seemed like a win/win. But, as often happens, life has other plans. Instead of staying around with Callie, momma cat began trying to lure her away into the woods. Callie, still a young kitten and too small to be spayed, was absent from the barn for increasing periods of time. Her mom was never in the barn anymore. Even when she’d been there with her kittens, she stayed in the upper hay mow and avoided the area in the lower level with the grain and thus, the mice. I actually was trapping mice for her and bringing them up to the haymow on the upper level of the barn and presenting them to momma cat. You may laugh out loud here, who could blame you?

After recovering from her spay surgery, momma cat began to move into the woods and lure Callie there with her. AT one point there was NO little kitten in my barn at any time during the day, except to come and eat dinner at nine o’clock at night. She came running down from the woods, presumably away from her mother, rubbed all over me and ate her dinner. (I should say here that I have no idea what exactly her mom was doing and even if she was still alive, I’m just guessing it was her mom who lured her away from the barn. I can’t imagine what else would have, and she always went in the direction her mom took in and out of the barn.)

That was enough for me. No way was I going to let a tiny, mostly white, hawk-bait of an unspayed kitten become yet another wild cat living in the woods and having litter after litter if she lived that long. The decision made, I went to the barn at 9 pm, ready to pick up Callie the Adorable, bring her back in the house and find her a safer place to live. No Callie. I called and called. No Callie. I walked back to the house, sick with worry, and back to the barn 15 minutes later. No Callie. This continued for a gut wrenching and endless 45 minutes, until she finally dashed toward me from the woods around 10 at night. I picked her up and carried her into the farmhouse, snuggling my face against her fur, allergies be damned. Dan Johnson, bless him, of Friends of Ferals came to pick her up the next day, and within  just a few more days she’d already found her perfect, forever home.

And here it is, with Veterinary Technician Jenny Maahs. She is as over the moon about Callie as one could be, and I’m thrilled that it has all worked out so well.

And here’s more good news: The remaining two kittens, the two little ginger girls Brava and Gabby, are available right now (Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th) at the Catapalooza at the Dane County Humane Society in Madison, WI. Here’s my request: If you adopt one (or both?), please, please give Friends of Ferals permission for me to contact you and send you a present. If you’d like to come out to the farm and see where they were born I’m sure I could arrange that!

Earlier I wrote about Willie’s extreme and fearful reaction to a visiting man about a month ago, speculated about its causes and discussed how to respond. Here’s an update, and a few things I that might be helpful for anyone dealing with a behavior problem.

The good news (yeah good news) is that Willie is doing much, much better. He’s responded well to the last 5 unfamiliar men he’s met, running up to them immediately, getting close, asking for petting. There are no overt signs of fear anymore, (but keep reading), which makes me very happy. To quickly review, I’ve changed his diet back to avoid chicken and lamb, put his Hobbles back on when meeting strangers, gotten him acupuncture, and managed his interactions with unfamiliar men, such that he met them first outside or in the office (the house being the site of the extreme reaction). Early on I asked the men to stand back and let Willie approach them and they tossed food on the ground or handed him a toy (throwing would be ideal, but can’t do that now because of his shoulder).

Here are 3 things that this episode has highlighted that I think are universally important in all behavioral regressions:

1. Jump on it. Part of why I suspect that Willie is doing so well is that I immediately, that very day, sat down, thought out a treatment plan and began acting on it. I didn’t wait to see if it would happen again. I didn’t excuse it as being a ‘glitch’ that was meaningless. There’s not enough time in the world to list all the times I’ve heard (or experienced) seeing an agonistic pucker, or hearing a growl that seemed atypical for a dog, and then the next day, or the next week, observing the problem escalate. Example: My sweet-like-butter-to-people Border Collie Misty began to be aggressive to other dogs as she got older. I managed her carefully and things went well. I remember well a day when she flashed a hard eye at Lassie, and I thought: hummmm, I’d better get on that soon, something might be going on between them. But “soon” wasn’t that day, and the next morning Misty escalated and went after Lassie. I learned then and there that the first sign of trouble needs to be dealt with instantly. (And that worked for years with Misty: the  first sign of a hard eye got an instant response –”Misty, get back, lie down and stay there and calm down…”). If you see something that looks like it might be problematic, don’t panic, but don’t put off responding either.

2. It’s the little things (or, it’s not over til it’s over). I took Willie into PT yesterday and there was a male 4th year student in the room. Yeah Willie, he ran right up to Joe, body loose, happy faced. All’s well, right? I thought it was, until little things began to creep into my awareness. First off, Willie didn’t behave normally when we moved around the room to show Courtney how he was using his shoulder. Usually Willie responds instantly to Stand, Lie Down, etc. It’s a game with him and he loves it. He knows the room, the context and has done it perfectly a million times. But this time he didn’t lie down when I asked, (took 3 tries), and although he was focused on me he wasn’t himself. Most people would define his behavior as “disobedient.” He was, technically speaking, but I realized later it was because he was nervous with Joe in the room (or at least, that’s my best guess.) Willie also was more animated than usual, and would have been nipping at my legs if I hadn’t seen it about to happen as we walked around the room. Neither did he want to settle down for Courtney when she examined all. These subtle changes were great reminders that Willie is better, but he’s still not himself. It’d be easy to stop CCg him now and be less concerned with his internal physiology, because of his ‘happy’ reactions to strangers, but that would be a  mistake.

3. It takes a village: Most people don’t have the luxury that I do of having a blog with an amazing cast of thoughtful, intelligent readers, but everyone has someone else who is dog savvy that they can discuss their problems with. Don’t hesitate to find a good source with which to talk out a behavior problem. First, you might get some helpful perspectives you wouldn’t have thought of yourself, and at the least, it forces you to organize your thoughts about what is going on. I find writing things down incredibly helpful when I’m thinking through a problem, so try that before you talk to friends. Be aware that some feedback might be less than useful: perhaps some of your friends will respond that you “just need to be the alpha,” when you know that’s the last thing you need to be doing for your dog. Just thank them for the feedback and make mental note to talk about something less volatile, maybe religion and politics, next time with them.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: I‘m about to jump on a plane for Florida , leaving the farm in the hands of a wonderful couple. Gotta run or I’ll miss my plane! See you in Orlando and Naples (promise to come up and say hi!). Here’s Mr. Willie boy, so happy to be able to play with toys again.