Scarlett Goes to the Vet

This morning Scarlett went to my regular vet to get her tapeworms treated and a number of other issues checked out.

I realized she had tapeworms on Saturday when I found the distinctly unpleasant egg casings on her poop. Tapeworms are the easiest of the common worms to treat (it's pretty much a one-and-done pill treatment, whereas most of the other worms require several days or even weeks of deworming medication), but in my opinion they are by far the grossest. Like, not even close.

So as soon as I saw that, I called up my vet, because I was not going to wait to see the rescue vet. Nope. No way. I will pay all kinds of premiums to not have tapeworms in my house.

I also wanted to have several other issues checked: the patchy hair loss, the persistently itchy skin, a gauge of just how underweight Scarlett was, and so forth.

Scarlett was an absolute sweetheart at the vet. She didn't hassle the other dogs or cats in the waiting room (although she did tilt her head curiously whenever she heard a meow), she was sweet and polite with the vet tech, she let both the vet and the tech manipulate her legs and look at her teeth and get her up on the weighing table without a squeak of protest, and all in all she was a model patient. This puppy really does have a wonderful temperament, and she showed it during that visit.

The health news wasn't great, but it was better than I expected.

She does have tapeworms (which I already knew) and the vet prescribed medication for that. A skin scrape ruled out mange (good!). Allergies remain a possibility, but the vet thought it was more likely that her skin issues were caused by a bacterial infection (her lymph nodes were significantly swollen and the red bumps along her belly and inner thighs are consistent with a bacterial skin infection), so Scarlett has a course of antibiotics to get through and a bottle of medicated shampoo to alleviate some of the itching and dandruff.

I also submitted a stool sample for a fecal test, the results of which are expected back on Wednesday.

So the good news is that all of this stuff should be eminently treatable. The bad news is that she was ever allowed to get into this condition in the first place. It remains unfathomable to me that an owned dog could live in someone's home for two months and wind up this underweight, with tapeworms and an untreated skin infection, before finally being returned to the rescue.

When we got home, Scarlett got her first of probably many medicated baths. She was not excited. She did, however, accept her miserable fate with as much dignity as possible (which was, sadly, not a lot).

And that's where we are on the health front for now. She is putting on some weight, at least. Today she clocked in at 36 pounds, which is far from excellent but at least represents some improvement.

In other news, Scarlett is also not excited about the cold and damp weather we've been having. She hates walking through the snow and picks her feet up ridiculously high in a futile attempt to avoid it, although she absolutely loves eating snow and will run around hunting down particularly tasty drifts. If we get a half-decent dump from the blizzard that's supposed to be coming in tonight, I'll take her out to see how she does in deep snow.

This week Scarlett is scheduled to start meeting with prospective adopters. It's my hope that we find her a good match and a real home soon.

Scarlett - First Four Days

We're about midway through our first week with foster dog Scarlett, and things are going pretty much as one might expect. Currently she's spending a lot of time in the crate, which I don't love (particularly as my crate is a bit too small for her), but until we get potty training handled, there's no good way around it.

The good news is that we're making solid progress on the potty training front. Either Scarlett was pretty much housebroken at her previous home, and she just had a temporary regression here, or she's a quick learner. In either case, we're quickly reaching an understanding that outside is for pottying and inside is not.

Less-good news is that Scarlett is prone to submissive urination. She pees a little whenever the other dogs are mean to her, and since Pongu is a giant bully dickhead to foster dogs, that means Scarlett invariably widdles on my floor within five minutes of coming inside, even if she pottied successfully on the walk, because it never takes more than five minutes for Pongu to start being a jerk to her.

So it would be a lie if I said that she hadn't had any accidents, but the only reason she has accidents is because Pongu makes a point of being mean to Scarlett until she pees herself (at which point she goes back in the box and Pongu gloats mightily at her woe), and I don't know if that counts. If you took out the "resident dog is a giant wiener" factor, Scarlett would have a pretty good track record.

She has a pretty good Sit-Stay even in outdoor environments with another dog nearby. It's very much a beginner Sit-Stay, but it's there, and I can't take any credit for that one because she already knew how to do it when she got here. Improving on that is just going to be a matter of practice and proofing -- Scarlett clearly has the basic concept down, she just needs work on distance, distractions, and duration.

She's also very good at walking on leash now. Not totally perfect, but easy enough that I can take all three dogs out for a walk, hold their leashes on one hand (one finger per leash!) if necessary, and it's sufficiently non-annoying that I can walk them around for an hour-plus and still be mostly sane at the end of it.

I think she's beginning to put on weight, but it's too early for me to feel sure about that yet.

When she got here, Scarlett was (and still is) visibly underweight. Her bones stuck out all over, she had bad flaky dandruff and patches of hair loss, she scratched herself constantly, and she had kennel cough. All in all I was pretty worried when I saw her, because she looked like a straight shelter pull, not a dog who'd been living in a home for two months. Her former owner had told me that Scarlett was eating 5 cups of kibble plus fish oil supplements every day, and it was hard for me to square that with the obviously undernourished dog I received.

That's more than twice what I feed my dogs (Pongu and Crooky came at 63 and 72 pounds at their last weigh-ins, and they get about 2 cups of kibble apiece per day), so I thought that if this puppy was eating that much and still looked so skinny, then she must have some metabolic disorder and possible food allergies. That could be a real problem -- allergies, in particular, can be an extremely expensive and troublesome proposition that could put off a lot of adopters. Dobermans are known to be prone to such problems, and Scarlett epitomizes poor breeding, so it wouldn't be a surprise at all if she turned out to have those issues. If she did, then I'd be faced with trying to place a special-needs dog, which could be a real headache.

The jury is still out as to whether Scarlett does in fact have allergies or disorders. But I've been giving her slightly over 2 cups of kibble per day, plus raw food supplements and treats, and in the few days that I've had her, it appears that her dandruff is getting better, she doesn't smell as strongly as she did on arrival, her energy level has gone up, and her weight seems (I think) to be increasing. Her kennel cough is also improving; she barely coughs at all anymore, except when we've been out on a long walk (we do a lot of long walks to improve her stamina and leash manners).

So it's possible -- fingers crossed! -- that either Scarlett's previous diet didn't agree with her, or her adopter's report wasn't entirely accurate, and we're not dealing with major food intolerance issues. But at this point that's just a possibility, I haven't seen enough to feel sure about anything yet.

(^ not the best picture I got from that attempt, but the one that makes me laugh the most. Pongu's forlorn eye roll that Scarlett can't hold a Sit on the stairs is hilarious to me.)

Aaaalso, this dog sings prison blues in her crate constantly. She isn't crying or whining to get out. She's just... grumbling, talking to herself, occasionally sighing in discontent, and otherwise offering a running commentary on the whole world from the box. It isn't especially loud (hardly any barking, at least so far) and it's generally pretty funny, but it is striking how completely quiet Scarlett is outside the crate, and how vocal she is when she's inside. So far, the talky/grumbly/jailhouse blues singing thing hasn't diminished at all, so I guess her prospective adopters should probably be prepared for a certain amount of crate commentary in their lives.

Scarlett Comes (Back) to Philly

Yesterday we got Temporary Dog #27: a five-month-old purebred red Doberman puppy named Scarlett.

This is actually Scarlett's second time through Wags. She was originally adopted out as a 12-week-old puppy back in November 2014 and was placed with a very nice family in Connecticut. Back then, her name was "Harper Paisley," which is still the name on her internal paperwork at the rescue (so if anyone is wondering why the dog has two names, that's the reason! Harper was her original rescue name and Scarlett is the name that she actually knows and answers to).

Unfortunately, her adoptive family fell into some severe and unforeseeable troubles and was forced to return her to the rescue. So, at five months old, Scarlett is now back with the rescue group and once again looking for a home.

I've only had Scarlett for a little less than 24 hours, so it's very early to make even preliminary assessments of her temperament or personality at this stage. Here's what I can say so far, though:

-- She has kennel cough right now. She also appears to be a little underweight (although it's possible that this is just teenage puppy gawkiness) and has dry skin with some dandruff.

In response, I've changed her diet from Blue Buffalo kibble (which is what her adopter had been feeding her -- that's a good-quality brand, but it's possible that formulation might just not have agreed with the puppy) and switched her to Acana kibble supplemented with the same variety of canned foods, home-cooked foods, and raw foods that my dogs eat. I also gave her an apple cider vinegar rinse this morning to hopefully cut down on some of Scarlett's "doggy odor." We'll see if any of these things help.

-- Housebreaking is very much a work in progress. Given her young age and the culture shock of transitioning from Connecticut to the middle of Philly, however, this isn't too surprising. I'm hopeful that this will prove to be a temporary regression and we'll be out of this phase soon.

-- She's very dog-social and playful with other dogs of all breeds and sizes. Scarlett seems to love the company of other dogs. She's also friendly with children and seeks them out for cuddling and attention. I'd have no concerns placing her in a household with normal, sociable dogs or kids.

I'm not as confident about how she'd do with cats; my impression at this stage is that she would be fine living with familiar indoor cats but might be tempted to chase outdoor or barn cats. However, I'm not going to make any promises on that front this early. I haven't had her around enough cats or small animals yet to feel sure about that.

-- Scarlett seems to be familiar with leash walking and is doing nicely on her EasyWalk harness (although she can be a bit bouncy when she first comes out of her crate and has energy to burn). She seems to know "Sit" and defaults to it with just a little bit of hesitation.

-- I've seen no signs of resource guarding, separation anxiety, unwarranted aggression, or other obvious behavioral problems.

Overall my impression at this early stage is that Scarlett will likely make a wonderful pet for a family that understands and enjoys the highly affiliative, goofy-but-intense, occasionally distractible Dobie personality. Her adopters should be prepared to engage in some form of lifelong activity to keep her brain and body engaged -- whether it's a formal sport like agility or just frequent hikes in new environments, this puppy is going to need something beyond backyard games of fetch to stay happy -- and should also be prepared for lots of positive socialization throughout her adolescence and young adulthood to keep her comfortable around strange people and, especially, strangers coming into her home.

At this point I don't know yet whether I would recommend her as a performance prospect. Her caution in new environments is very pronounced at this stage, and one of the effects of that is that she tends to investigate new areas with a hunched posture and all her weight on her back legs. This distorts her gait and conformation enough that I don't feel comfortable trying to evaluate that myself (admittedly, structural evaluations are not my strongest point, and a more experienced eye might be able to see things that I'm missing... but I can't, so I don't want to make any representations about Scarlett's structure until I've been able to see her more evened out). I also haven't seen enough to feel comfortable assessing her mental qualities for performance yet.

So that's where we are after our first day together. I hope to hang onto Scarlett for the standard two weeks in order to do a more thorough evaluation and hopefully match her to the perfect home. Beyond that, though, it's my hope that we'll be able to place her with a loving forever family very soon.

Two-Month Countdown

Yesterday I dropped Pongu's very first CPE agility trial entry in the mail, and today the mail carrier came and took it away, so I can't break into the office mailbox and steal it back anymore. No chance for second thoughts!

So we are scheduled to have our Official Agility Trial Debut on Saturday, January 24, at Bella Vista. We're entered in two Standard runs and one Colors run. I have no idea what a "Colors run" actually is, other than what I've gleaned from reading my friends' blog posts on the topic, but honestly my comprehension is not that great so I still have pretty much no clue what that means on the ground. I guess I'll find out.

I'm not expecting greatness. Bella Vista is (I think?) a good choice for our agility debut, since Pongu has trialed there many times for Rally and he's got a mostly-good performance record at that venue. Far from flawless, but about as good as it ever gets for my wildly inconsistent, anxiety-raddled crazydog. I'm told that the judge is a good one for newbies, too, so that helps. And we're only doing three runs, and I tried to pick the easier course options, so that ought to help as well.

But we've only been training in agility since... August maybe? ...and that means it will be just about six months from the time that Pongu and I took our first class in this sport until our first attempt at trialing. Even given that he's got some experience in other sports, and even allowing for the relative ease of CPE Level 1, that's not nearly long enough for me to have any reasonable expectation that we'll Q.

I still want to try it, though. I want to see how Pongu does in a new environment (which this will be for him -- he's been there for Rally, but he's never been there when the place was set up for agility), with the noise and adrenaline of an agility trial surrounding him, on unfamiliar equipment for the first time.

If he can handle it, I think we should have an okay-ish chance of maybe qualifying in one out of our three runs. If I stay close to Pongu and give him a whole lot of support going over each obstacle and never veer away until he's over each jump and through each contact zone, then in two months, we might have a chance.

Or we might not! I have no idea! Both of us are green as green can be. Seasick frogs, leprechaun Packers fans, you get the idea. Pongu's never done more than about 6 to 8 obstacles in sequence, and most of his fake course practice has been at the Zoom Room, where the obstacles are significantly smaller than regulation size and packed much more tightly together.

Examples:

I know we're not really ready. I don't think we'll be ready in two months, either. I can't read a course map worth a damn, my handling is a perpetual thing of sadness, and my dog is still terrified of half the obstacles on the course.

But I think that part of how we're going to get ready is by doing this trial as an experiment. I want to see what I can get from Pongu in a real live trial environment. And I want to see what it's like, too. I've never even been to a CPE trial myself; every time this fall that there was one reasonably close for me to watch, we had a conflict with a Rally trial or some other project, so I couldn't go.

So we'll just go and try to have fun and see how it goes. Let the countdown begin.

Silver Goes Home, Pongu Finishes His MX2

Last Friday, Silver went home with a couple of awesome adopters.

It's been the better part of a week and they haven't called yet to say that they're sending her back, so I guess it's safe to say at this point that she has officially been Adopted! and is, hopefully, off to a happily-ever-after.

All the best to you, little dog. Have a great life.

On Saturday, Pongu and I drove up to Andover NJ to finish up his ARCHMX2 championship (and his RL1X7, because eh, why not).

I don't have a whole lot to say about that one. It was an unspectacular performance; Pongu barely scraped out a triple Q in his first set of runs. He's frequently stressy at that venue, it was an extremely cold morning, we had Crooky in the car because Peter was out of town that weekend, and I hadn't slept at all the night before. All in all, neither Pongu nor I was in great form at that trial.

His fronts and finishes were quick and straight, and his heeling was actually pretty good (lots of head drops, but his position was better and more consistent than I've ever gotten at a trial before), but Pongu was too anxious to pay attention to my cues, so he kept guessing what I wanted and often he'd guess wrong. I got a couple of missed fronts where he went straight to a finish instead, a couple of reluctant Downs where he only went partway down and then popped back up into a Sit, a finish instead of a backup on the Level 3 bonus exercise, and... just a bunch of stuff like that. No broken Stays or blown jumps, so no NQs, but our scores were pretty sad.

But Pongu did finish his MX2 in the first set of runs, even if he did cut it close.

I scratched the second set because I had to get back to work and also, with zero sleep, I was legitimately concerned about being a road hazard on the way back if we stayed the whole time. It was shaping up to be a long trial, and I didn't think I could handle another four to six hours of being awake before trying to drive home in the dark. Probably Pongu would have done better on his second set of runs after having had a few more hours to acclimatize, but oh well, didn't happen.

We have a couple more Rally trials in December, but nothing else big on the horizon. Pongu's MX2 is the only major title he had left to finish this year. I aaalmost wish he hadn't gotten it so that we could have finished it at our home club on December 7, but then I would have had to stress about "what if he misses it? what if we don't get a triple Q?" and so it's probably better to just have that worry off the table.

Pongu is the 13th mixed-breed dog in the history of the world to finish the ARCHMX2 title, the 60th dog overall, and the 10th dog in all breeds to get it this year. (Those last two achievements might need asterisks, though, as there were two other dogs who also won their MX2s that same weekend, and I have no idea which of them actually was first in time.)

Hoo-ray. I guess I should finally think about putting up another ribbon board in my office.

Silver Gets Ready to Go Home

We are winding down our time with Silver. Tomorrow she's scheduled to go home with wonderful adopters, and I hope she'll go on to have an amazing life. I always feel so lucky to be able to help these little guys move from a desperately bad situation to some of the most caring and committed homes in the world. Where they go is lightyears better than where they've been, and every time I place a dog, I'm thrilled for that dog and sad for the others who didn't roll such a lucky number in life's lottery.

But anyway.

In her last few days here, we haven't really been working on anything new. Some other stuff popped up over the past week or so that's unfortunately derailed a lot of my attention away from training the foster dog, so poor Silver has mostly been on the back burner this week.

One of the things we have been working on is impulse control in outdoor environments, also known as "not freaking out and losing your mind when another dog walks by on the sidewalk, plz kthx." On Sunday, Silver suddenly started jumping and barking at other dogs she saw around our neighborhood. I'm not entirely sure what's going on there, except that it seems to be some stripe of excitement/frustration/territorialness and not a fear reaction. Which is good, because excitement is much easier to fix than fear.

So we've spent some time figuring out Silver's threshold distances (i.e., how close she can be to another dog before she starts losing her mind) and then working on various alternative incompatible behaviors at or below threshold distance. I'm prompting her for attention, immediately rewarding that, and then either prompting for a Sit or a quick, happy walk away from the other dog, depending on which is more appropriate in that particular situation. If the dog is already moving away from us, I ask for a Sit. If the dog is either staying in place or moving toward us, then I prompt Silver to move away.

That gets rewarded too: once we're sufficiently far away and Silver is paying enough attention to me, I throw a big party of treats and praise and a little bit of chase/tag play or petting depending on whether I want to ramp her up or calm her down.

After three days of this, we've made enough progress that we're pretty much back to where we were on Sunday right before she started reacting at all. We took this picture on a side street this morning with another dog about 40 feet away on a cross street:

...and that was one of five or six pictures I was able to get with only the briefest diversions of eye contact away from me. Silver held that Sit for almost a full minute and was, with only sporadic reinforcement (because I was trying to take pictures and couldn't rapid-fire treats the whole time), able to ignore the other dog at that distance.

I am, accordingly, pretty confident that her adopters should be able to get a handle on this behavior without too much trouble. They seem to be pretty on top of things, and Silver is not a dog that I'd currently characterize as "reactive." Her behavior is no worse than what I've seen from many, many excitable sport dogs on the competition circuit. You can't have a firecracker that doesn't throw a few sparks!

But, on the flipside, it is an issue that we're dealing with right now, and it is not hard to accidentally make reactive behavior worse by putting the dog over threshold or turning it into full-blown defensive aggression by employing punishment at the wrong times (these borderline excitement/frustration cases are really, really one of those situations where if you are going to use punishment, getting the timing right is super important -- one of many reasons I don't choose to go that way), so it's definitely not a place where you'd want to go "okay, problem solved" and just ignore it. This is going to need continued work to strengthen and maintain.

Also Silver met a cat today:

She was reaaaally fascinated with that cat. I think she was as amazed by the invisible forcefield protecting the cat, and the cat's resultant fearlessness, as the presence of the cat itself. Silver is still a little bit confused about glass doors (she's finally stopped walking facefirst into the glass doors around our condo, but that took about a week, and I can see her get confused by other glass doors that she encounters on walks), and this glassed-in viewing portal just about blew her mind.

On the health front, I'm keeping an eye on the two raw spots on her legs. When she arrived, she had a ton of little nicks and cuts all over her front legs and paw pads. I'll never know for sure how she got them, but I would guess that she probably picked up those cuts while wandering around in the woods. It can be a rough life for a dog out there.

Most of her cuts healed up within the first week, but she's got two that are not healing like the others, and I'm starting to wonder if she's been worrying at them and turning them into hot spots. I haven't caught her licking or chewing at them, but it's possible that she's been doing that in the crate while I'm at work and can't watch her. The spots themselves appear inconclusive at this time -- they're not definitely hot spots to my eye, but they also aren't definitely not hot spots. If they persist for more than a week post-adoption, or if they get any worse, that might warrant a look from a vet.

Finally, she's been spending a lot of time playing biteyface with Crookytail, up until Pongu intervenes and ruins their games (which he always does, because Pongu thinks playing is Against The Rules):

And that's more or less where we are as we start wrapping up Silver's stint as a foster dog. Tomorrow morning I'll pack up her tiny suitcase, and tomorrow afternoon she is scheduled to go home.

End of Week One with Silver

We're coming to the end of our first week with Silver.

Training is going well. She's pretty good on a loose leash (she's started pulling toward other dogs, but this is normal and is typically just a phase that lasts until she realizes that it never works and only good behavior ever gets anything), potty training is progressing nicely (we're now down to approx. 10 minutes of walking around outside before she potties, and there have been zero accidents since that first rainy day), and she's beginning to do a default Sit at the door to go outside instead of trying to jump up and scratch at it to get me to open the door. Her "Sit" is starting to transition to a pure verbal cue without any hand gestures.

She still cries in the crate a little when she's bored, but this has been steadily diminishing for the past several days and I'm pretty sure it will vanish altogether by the end of next week. Crate crying is a behavior that has a high chance of regressing when she moves to a new environment, though, so her adopters should probably be prepared to start all over again on that one. As far as I can tell, it's just run-of-the-mill "I'm bored/lonely/have to potty and I want to get out" crying, not indicative of separation anxiety. Silver has shown no separation anxiety while I've had her, and by this point I would have expected it to start showing up at least a little bit if she had that issue.

One important caveat there is that I can't tell if she has isolation distress. I don't think she does (I haven't seen any signs of it), but I can't make a 100% guarantee about that one.

(Footnote explanation: These terms are often used interchangeably, especially in quick-and-dirty "training 101" materials on the Internet, but they actually refer to two slightly different things. Separation anxiety refers to a dog who becomes distressed upon being separated from a specific person or creature. The presence of a different person or creature does not console the dog. Pongu might be considered to have separation anxiety, because he only cares if I'm around; he does not care if anybody else is around. The presence of any other person or animal, even if it's Peter the Spousal Unit or Crookytail, does nothing to make him feel better. If I'm not there, he gets panicky. That's classic separation anxiety.

Isolation distress refers to an animal who becomes distress upon being isolated from all other people or creatures. The animal is not attached to one (or two) specific person(s) or animal(s), and can therefore be consoled by having another familiar creature around. Crookytail used to be like this when we first got him: if he was left alone, he would panic. If he had another person or dog around -- even if the other dog was Pongu, who was just a complete jerk to him back then [not that this has changed] -- then he was okay. Because Crooky is not actually a crazy dog, he got over this on his own within a couple of months as he became more comfortable in our home and more accustomed to our routines, but we did have a few months there where he really didn't like to be left totally alone and would very carefully wreck one thing every time he was isolated for more than a few minutes.)

The reason I can't be 100% sure about Silver and isolation distress is because, at least so far, she's never been totally alone while I've had her. Either Peter or one of the other dogs has always been around. I honestly do not think this is an issue for her, but I'll note it in the interest of full disclosure: that's a potential blind spot in my evaluation.

Everything I can evaluate, however, leads me to believe that she's an awesome little pet dog. She really hits that balance of playful and mellow that everybody asks for, she's picking up good manners at a quick clip, and she's appropriately sociable with everyone and everything I've introduced her to so far (by which I mean: she doesn't mug people for attention but she doesn't cringe or snap either. Friendly neutrality and occasional curiosity seems to be her default attitude, which is exactly what I think makes for the easiest dogs).

As to whether she'd be suited for dog sports... eh, I think it's still too early to tell on that front.

I did introduce her to Lotus Balls a few days ago. This is her first attempt:

...and then we started doing some suuuuper basic introductions to a bar jump. This is her third session overall, second one where the bar wasn't just flat on the ground (it's raised about 3 inches in this clip).

Silver has a good, quick recovery from being startled by the noise when she crashes into the bar and knocks it off the cups, and she's easy to motivate with food, either indoors or outdoors. She has pretty decent interest in toys (both chase and tug toys) but I haven't really attempted to use toys as motivators or built up her play skills in any serious fashion. I don't imagine it would be difficult, I just haven't put the time in to do that.

Her attention span is increasing noticeably even over the course of this first week and our training sessions are beginning to get a little more structured, which is nice.

So that's pretty much where we are at the end of this first week. Silver has meetings with two sets of prospective adopters this weekend. Both seem like very nice homes and I'm hopeful that she'll hit it off with one or both.