Surf’s Up with the Pups

Just kidding. They don’t swim. A better title would have something to do with the dead crabs littering the rocky beach.

We are so lucky to live in a place where we can regularly find safe places to play with our pups off leash, both in the snow, and on the beach! (But see Monday’s post about how even our Best Dog Park can be a recipe for disaster.)

Here’s Rob with the doggies at Cherry Point.

One more important thing. I recently updated my Reactive Dog Resources page with a new book called The Midnight Dog Walkers. If your dog barks and lunges, or if you’ve ever found yourself timing your walks to avoid seeing other dogs or people (like, say, at midnight?), you must read this book!!

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What happens at the dog park

Pups at the best park

I try not to write too many posts about the wacky and/or horrifying things that happen at the dog park. I know and trust lots of dog professionals who think off-leash parks are terrible places where bad behavior gets reinforced by clueless dog owners making the wrong choices for their dogs.

I agree. But I also have a well-socialized dog who is leash-reactive, so when the weather’s nice, it’s easier to exercise him off-leash in a park with other dogs than it is to walk him anywhere on leash. (Pacific Northwest people and their bicycles! Oy. They’re everywhere.)

And while it’s incredibly trite for me to regale you with anecdotes about the badly behaved dogs and stupid humans we encounter… I’m going to.

I’ve long since given up my dream of politely telling prong collar parents that it’s unsafe for their dog to wear the collar inside the park. (Trust me. I’ve been the idiot dog owner who leaves the prong collar on.) But a couple of times recently, I wished I had a tactful way to tell another dog parent that they’re doing it wrong.

1) Dog A was crouched in a hole of his own digging when Dog B tried to join in. Dog A got snarly. Dog Parent A said, “He hates to share. I wish he wouldn’t do that.” Dog Parent B: “The more you bring him, he’ll figure it out.” Dog Parent A: “Yeah, we need to bring him more.”

No! Bad plan!

2) This one really cleared the park. Our Best Dog Park has a significant design flaw: Only one entrance. Leo and I were chasing a ball at the opposite end, fortunately, when we heard a major Barkapalooza by the gate. Not your healthy, “Hey I’m at the park, yay!” barks, nor your “I have barrier frustration, but once I get in there, I’ll be fine” woofs, but full-blown reactive barking. Rob had a better vantage and saw the man enter with his dog on a long ropey leash. “He was pretty determined to barrel his way in,” Rob reported. This dog snarled and lunged at another dog, and the two had to be separated. The man continued to walk through the park with his dog on leash.

Now then. My guess is that his dog does not have good recall, so he planned to keep it on a longline at the park. My guess is also that he does not understand that his dog likely was barking and lunging because it was on leash. (Unless it always acts that way, in which case, it has no business at the dog park.)

But what can I say to that guy? “Hey, your dog is experiencing barrier frustration. He probably will be better without the leash.” Because I don’t know that. So I just said to Rob, “We should go.” And we went.

One more dog park story, but this one is a cautionary tale to myself.

3) We arrived close to sunset when no one else was there except for a couple sitting on plastic chairs looking at their phones while their dog lay down a ways away. Nothing inherently wrong with this behavior, but I dislike it when people expect their dogs to entertain themselves at the park. Of course the point is for dogs to play with each other, but their people should be alert and involved. Dog parks are not a substitute for spending time with your dog.

After a little bit, the man got up and threw a ball to his dog, which got Leo pretty interested in this dog he had been ignoring and who had been ignoring him. When Leo blocked the dog and prevented it from retrieving the ball so the man had to go get the ball himself, I muttered to Rob, “Whatever, I don’t feel anything for people who just sit around and look at their phones while their dogs do nothing.”

Then I realized the girl with him was young, probably his daughter. And I wondered what circumstances might lead a man and his daughter to spend a Friday night at the dog park with no other dogs, and not play with their dog. I imagined a divorced dad with the daughter for the weekend. Not much to do at his divorced dad pad. When they get back, she’s going to go to her room and not talk to him for the rest of the night. This time at the dog park is the only time they have together.

Turns out, I did feel something for them. I don’t know what their story really is, but it’s none of my business. There’s nothing to be gained by mentally criticizing anyone. You never know what they’re going through.

How about you, friends? How often do you judge your fellow dog parents? Can you hold your tongue when you see a disaster in the making?

 

How not to medicate dogs

A frame Mia

After we started treating Leo for pannus, Mia’s eyes started looking goopy. Tempting as it was to just start giving her the same medicine we give Leo, I took her in for her own eye exam. While Mia has better social skills than Leo in many ways (as far as people are concerned), Leo is actually the friendlier dog. Mia is not very cooperative when it comes to being examined, and will try her hardest to escape.

We managed to get her up on the motorized, elevated exam table, and I held her still long enough to have her eyes looked at. I tried not to be offended when the vet tech asked if she needed to be muzzled. Nothing against muzzles, but in this situation it would have only increased her aversion. We have never muzzled her, and she doesn’t bite. It seems my eye doctor has had bad experiences with German shepherds before, so rather than be defensive, the best I can do is hope for my dogs to be breed ambassadors.

Anyway, she was diagnosed with dry eye. Not as serious as Leo’s pannus, but requiring one of the same medicines. They gave it to me in drop form, even though Leo was getting it as an ointment.

Mia hated the medicine. She ran away from me when I tried to put it in, and afterward, would wipe at her eye. I told the eye doctor this and she said maybe to try the ointment because the drops might sting. Owie! Poor Mia!

For several weeks, I only managed to give her the medicine once a day, because she clearly hated it so much. She didn’t wipe at her eyes like she did with the drops, but she ran away from me afterward. If I gave her a piece of cheese afterward, she’d run away from me next time I offered cheese. If I gave it to her after she came in the house at bedtime, she’d refuse to come back inside next time.

Mia is totally on to me. I have to vary the routine so she doesn’t form a negative association with anything that happens anywhere near the time I give her the medicine. She does hold still when I give her the medicine, but she obviously holds a grudge.

For several days, I gave it to her right before or right after we went on our evening walk, which was working out pretty well. But it became clear that getting the medicine once a day is not enough, so now I have to find a time to do it in the morning that doesn’t ruin our entire relationship.

I feed them right before I leave the house. I put Mia’s bowl in her little condo outside, and close her in the dog run. She used to trot right into her condo for breakfast. After just one day of my giving her eye medicine before feeding her, she refused to come back into the dog run from the big yard. I’m telling you, she holds a grudge!

Any trainer would say the trick is to give her a really high value reward to give her a better association with the medicine. But you see what’s happening here? The medicine is such an aversive it’s poisoning whatever reward I try to give her. I’ve made up my mind though, that it’s important for her to get the medicine twice a day. She’s due for her 3-month checkup, and I don’t even want to subject her to it until I’ve been giving her the proper dosage.

So I’ll be chasing her down twice a day, and hoping that she still loves me in between doses.

Positive TrainingThis post is part of the Positive Pet Training Blog Hop, hosted by Cascadian Nomads, Tenacious Little Terrier and Rubicon Days. This month’s theme is National Pet First Aid Awareness Month. The hop happens on the first Monday of every month, and is open for a full week – please join us in spreading the word about the rewards of positive training!

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Temple of the Dog

I recently had Lasik surgery.* Contact lenses had become really uncomfortable, so I preferred wearing glasses, but they interfered with my ability to take pictures using a DSLR. (Not to mention they got rained on and fogged up all the time.**)

That’s one of the reasons I’ve been slacking on taking pics of my pups.

No excuses now. Here’s the first batch of post-Lasik pics!

*Lasik is amazing, by the way. I highly recommend it. Find a good surgeon who’s done lots of surgeries. (I wouldn’t go to a discount place, but that’s just me). If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, go to Restore Vision Centers. The procedure couldn’t have been smoother, they were very calming, and they had chocolate and valium. Nothing but good things to say about the whole deal.

**I went on my first post-Lasik dog walk in the pouring rain on Sunday. It was magical to be able to see in the rain. It was also very cold and wet.

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The Accidental Recall

Thanks to Fern Camacho for having me back on his Great Dog Adventure podcast!

He’s started having real-world case studies, and I was more than happy to brag about how well Leo is doing with my magic string cheese method. When I heard that the Positive Pet Training Blog Hop theme for this month is “Recall,” I thought I’d take this opportunity to add another update.

Leashed Leo

My dogs do not have good recall. They don’t run off for no reason, but we lost Mia to a deer for one scary hour, and Leo has been untrustworthy in a few off-leash situations.

One of the parks we go to has a trail, so I bring string cheese along for the on-leash portion of the excursion. The other day, my god, we encountered a lot of challenges.

First, Mia dropped her ball down a blackberry bramble-covered hill, and we went back to get another one from the car.

Then on the way back down the trail, we passed a woman with a long-haired German shepherd that bared its teeth and snarled at my dogs. My dogs barked back. The woman said, “I guess he’s intimidated.” I was very cheerful back, because believe me, I am empathetic to people with reactive dogs. To quote the guy whom Isis bit, “No one could be more understanding.” I know I should only feel sorry for this woman that she didn’t know better than to bring her dog to the park. But I’ll admit, I was annoyed to see later that she hadn’t left the park, but instead was on her cell phone, throwing a ball down one of the trails, essentially preventing us from walking that way. (Plus we saw her a few days earlier, mindlessly throwing her ball to the dog while on her cell phone.)

In the play area, a Labradoodle stole Leo’s ball a few times, which happens, like, every time we go to the park, but I was distractedly getting the ball back from its owner and missed the appearance of a man on a bicycle. When I saw him, I calmly said, “My dog is going to chase this bicycle,” and leashed up Leo to take him to the other end of the field. However, the man had a dog with him, so he parked his bicycle and stayed a while.

Then, Leo pooped. So I tucked the Chuck-It under one arm, and took out a poop bag, and then it seemed like Leo had run off, so I looked over my shoulder to see another bicycle riding along the path… and Leo running through the field … TO ME. He wasn’t chasing the bike! At the risk of overstating what happened, I think Leo saw the bike and thought to himself, “When I see bikes, I get cheese.” Or else he was on his way to chasing the bike when I redirected him with my offer of cheese. But either way!!

Not that the cyclist would have minded; he was encouraging a dog to chase him, and rode a loop around the whole park.

I of course gave Leo string cheese for coming to me, and then put his leash on. He did lunge once toward the bike as it made its way back toward us, but did not bark, and he put his attention back on me as I continued to cheese him.

I leashed him up two or three more times on this weird park excursion, more than once because I wanted to walk them down the trail that the lady and her long-haired shepherd were monopolizing. When I saw she was still there, I set my dogs free in the field again. I had a few other occasions to call Leo to me in exchange for cheese. And he came back!

So. In addition to accidentally training him with the cheese when I just meant to manage him, I accidentally have improved his recall.

I’m so, so, so proud of my boy. (And sorry that I called him “dopey” in the above podcast.)

Positive TrainingThis post is part of the Positive Pet Training Blog Hop, hosted by Cascadian Nomads,Tenacious Little Terrier and Rubicon Days. This month’s theme is Recall and the next hop begins on April 4th. The April theme will be training for safety/emergencies for National Pet First Aid Awareness Month. The hop happens on the first Monday of every month, and is open for a full week – please join us in spreading the word about the rewards of positive training!

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