The other day we were visiting one of our favorite Sheltie blogs, Reilly the CowSpot Dog. If you haven’t already, you should drop by and read all about Reilly’s adventures! http://cowspotdog.blogspot.com/
Reilly’s mom had found these great little Sheltie Charms on one of their adventures, and she was sharing three of them with some of their readers. How fun is that? Well, we had a nice suprise in the mail today, a super cute card with Reilly on it, and the Sheltie charm!
After looking at the charm, I’m pretty sure that they must have modeled the super short sheltie legs after little Layla herself. LOL
I had to take a picture of the fantastic card that Reilly sent and the charm, and then I couldn’t resist taking a quick picture of Layla’s short little legs. Isn’t there quite a resemblance? Hehe, I guess being short is “charming”. Sorry, just couldn’t help myself!
Layla has been playing around on her booja board and her little tippy plank thing for a while now, so I thought maybe it was time to get out the real teeter and give it a try.
Honestly, I was expecting something along the lines of what Rogue did when she learned the teeter. She just ran as fast as she could to the end and banged that teeter as hard as she could. LOL I think Rogue got satisfaction out of making the teeter hit the ground full speed. In fact, a couple of times she banged it down so hard that it bounced her off, (which amazingly didn’t bother her). Sorry, I’m getting off track here.
Well, Layla’s reaction was nothing like I expected! First, let me say that Layla is not sound sensitive, or motion sensitive. In fact, there really isn’t much that phases her, but something about the teeter was not to her liking. So, I remembered an article in Clean Run about a dog who had developed teeter phobias and how they overcame them, and I decided that instead of trying to coax her along faster than she was comfortable, I’d use the Premack Principle.
Basically stated, Premack is this: In operant conditioning, the Premack principle, developed by David Premack states that a commonly occurring action (one more desirable for the actor) can be used effectively as a reinforcer for a less commonly occurring one (that is, one less desirable for the actor). The example I’ve heard used most is that of child when a parent wants them to clean their room. They are more likely to watch tv…so in order to watch tv, they have to do the less desirable action of cleaning the room. (I hope that makes sense).
In Layla’s case with the teeter today, the likely or reinforcing behavior for her was that she would stay away from the teeter. So, I decided to use that as the reward. It worked something like this: If Layla will look at the teeter I will toss a treat away from it to reward her. Then after that step…I waited, she stepped on the teeter. Again, I tossed the treat away from the teeter. Eventually, she was jumping on the teeter on her own, without me coaxing her.
So here are a couple videos that we got of her first day on the teeter. These are taken after I remembered to grab the camera in the second session of training, so this is after all the initial work to get her more comfortable with the teeter. As you can see, by the end, she was able to go out to the teeter on her own, without coaxing. Yay! We still have a long ways to go, but at least she’s not as anxious as she was in the beginning.
This day has been a long time in coming, sadly. We have a “rescue/sanctuary” (that I will leave unnamed) in our area that was started by a very well intentioned, intelligent, caring person. However, in the last couple of years her good intentions have outweighed her reasonableness. As a result, she has taken in far more animals than she can care for properly.
Our all breed rescue has tried helping her take dogs to adoption events, only to have her take in more dogs than she adopted out. Ugh!!! The local shelter even got to the point that they quit allowing her transfer animals out into her program. Unfortunately, nothing has helped. When she couldn’t transfer them out into her program she would volunteer to transport them to other rescues, and then not deliver all of them. Incredible! It just absolutely must be like an addiction. That’s the only way it makes sense to me.
Finally, (not because she realized she was in over her head), but because the “rescue/sanctuary” was in violation of our kennel licensing laws, and because of the conditions the animals were in, the dogs were being taken to the shelter today. The animal control officer we spoke to today told us that they even found the bodies of a couple dogs that has died in the last few weeks!
The really frustrating thing is that even at this point, she seems to be in denial about the situation that she has put these dogs in. She even called the person in charge of adoptions with our rescue and asked her to get some of the dogs out and let her have them back! The answer is NO WAY!
The shelter took in about 16 dogs today. Unfortunately, while that would be plenty, in reality it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The low estimate of dogs she had in her care was around 50, so we’re missing a quite a few at this point! We know that animal control left 3 that she claims as her own personal pets, and 6 more that she says her daughter will pick up and take to the Salt Lake area in the morning. That’s still only got us to 25. We know for sure that she has moved a quite a number of the smaller breed dogs to some friend’s houses. How animal control will deal with that, I don’t know. They said that at this point, they are just going to keep a very close eye on her. I don’t know how successful that will be!
Anyway, it’s just a sad day for rescue in our area. I really wish this situation could have had a different ending.
So, we’ve been putting together a little bag full of items with all kinds of different textures that Layla can fetch. Here’s a picture of what she’s got in her bag. We started out with just basic stuffie type toys, and we’ve been adding things to the bag as time goes on. The plastic pudding cup is one of her personal favorites. LOL
I took some pictures of her fetching some of the stuff, but my lighting was worse than I thought today in the house, and my camera’s flash didn’t come up right. So all I got was a bunch of really blurry pictures. Sorry for the poor photo quality, but you get the idea.
If you have a weak stomach, and can’t stand the site of a little blood, I apologize in advance! For anyone else though…Layla had to go to the vet today to have some baby teeth pulled that just refused to come out on their own. If you’re like my husband you won’t appreciate these next pictures at all, but I couldn’t believe how long the roots were on these two canines. I just had to take a picture and share.
I think the roots are bigger than Layla is. LOL The next picture is of the two canines that we had pulled today beside a lower molar that she lost a few weeks ago.
Anyway, the good news is that the vet here let me be with her during the whole procedure, and it didn’t take long at all. In fact, our appointment was at 3:00 and that was less than a couple hours ago, and she’s already up and walking around and she was even barking at me a minute ago to let her outside to potty. She’s a tough little cookie!
This week is getting away from me quicker than I expected. LOL We had a really nice weekend! Friday started off with an obedience lesson for Twist and Raven. We have lots and lots to work on before the Utah Sheltie Specialty at the end of April. That’s good though.
Saturday and Sunday we spent at the DOCNA trial. I only had Zoe entered, but then they offered day of trial entries, so I broke down and entered Raven for the last run of the day on Sunday. Zoe had a nice weekend. She was really consistent and Q’d with first place in 8 of the 10 classes that she ran in. The other two were my fault. I got lost and sent her into an offcourse tunnel on one class, and realized it too late to get her turned around, and the other was a class called Strategic Time Gamble, and you make up your own course to accumulate points in the opening time period of 30 seconds. Then they blow a whistle and you have another 10-15 seconds to cross the finish jump. The problem is that you can’t finish too early or too late, it’s more a gamble of whether you can estimate how many obstacles your dog can complete in a certain amount of time, and I suck at that. We crossed the finish jump too soon, and lost the Q. Raven Q’d in her one jumpers run, which should have finished her Beginner’s jumper title.
Zoe did qualify in the North American Challenge Class though, and that is DOCNA’s qualifier for their Championships, so if we decide that we can get away (time and moneywise), we are qualified to go to Prescott, AZ in Oct. for the Western Championships. That would be fun!
The next few days are going to be busy. I am sitting waiting right now for a client to pick up their dog. I hate waiting for people. It seems like that’s what a majority of my time is spent doing with the boarding kennel. Waiting for people to pick-up/drop-off dogs. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could count on them showing up at a specific time, but you just can’t. People tell you that they’ll be there at one time and then show up hours later. It’s very frustrating because it means that you are tied to the house, and can’t leave.
Anyway, in the meantime, today I’m trying to get a packing list together so that I can be ready to leave Friday morning for Salt Lake. Zoe is entered in a DOCNA agility trial this weekend. I was only planning on travelling with Zoe and Layla this time, but there is an obedience ring set-up on Friday if we can get there early enough that would be ideal training for Twist and Raven. So…it’s looking like I’ll be bringing all the Shelties but Rogue this time. She’ll have to stay home with her dad and keep things in line here.
I have a three boarding dogs going home tomorrow, and at least one coming in, and then I have agility class with Zoe and Raven, and somewhere in between that I’d love to get a chance to bathe everybody. It’s not looking real promising though. LOL I almost forgot I have the cats that I’m watching for some friends while they are in Indiana too. All in all, it’s going to be a busy last half of the week, but I think alot of it is going to be spent hurrying up to sit around a wait for people.
We were supposed to be going to Salt Lake today to train with the dogs, but those plans have changed now! We got up to 9 inches of snow this morning and it’s still coming down. I think this might be the most snow we’ve had from one storm all year. Bleh! Just when everything had melted and the mud had dried out so we could play outside again, here we’ve got another batch of snow. LOL (Glad I resisted the urge to haul the agility equipment back out into the field)
I guess this just means that we’ll get another chance to take more pictures of the dogs playing in the snow this year. But for now, we’re staying in where it’s warm and watching from the window.
I have a little ranting to do…and a little raving too. Bear with me. LOL I got ahold of Dr. Overall and she agreed that it would be appropriate to add amitriptyline to Rogue’s daily meds at this point since we haven’t seen progress with the fluoxitine alone. I spoke with the vet here in Salt Lake today shared her recommendations, and he agreed to call in the prescription.
Here is my rave. The vet in Salt Lake asked me if I’d considered working with a trainer to help Rogue. I’m grateful that I have a vet who obviously realizes that Rogue’s issues need to be addressed by not only medication, but also through training. I wholeheartedly agree that behavior modification is vital. I would never think that medication alone is the answer. I feel very privileged that we found Dr. Overall through Leslie McDevitt and that she has given us protocols of behavioral modification to work through in addition to her recommendations for medication.
However, here’s my rant. I think I literally bristled a little when he made that comment. Long before I decided to go down this avenue of seeking anti-anxiety medication for Rogue, I had been working with her to modify her behavior. I thought that I’d explained what we’ve done with Rogue prior to coming to him. In fact, I think that anyone who knows Rogue…knows the amount of time and effort we’ve put into training. Granted, in hindsight not all the training that we did was helpful. In fact I think some backfired, but I did what I hoped would help. Bleh, I don’t know, it just struck me like he thought that I hadn’t tried any training before. Whatever, that’s my rant for the day!
So…here’s the latest. We’ll start her out adding 10 mg. of Amitriptyline once a day for 10 days and then go to 10 mg. twice daily. I’ll keep everyone posted if we see any changes. Keep hoping for the best…
