Anica - Going Into Week Two

Heading into week two and I'm starting to think my concerns about placing Anica in a home with cats may have been overblown. She does have terrier instincts (loves to chase balls, goes after the bunny fur tug, etc.), but she's also really gentle and easy to dissuade, so probably even a novice owner wouldn't have much trouble getting her to live safely with cats. I still wouldn't recommend her for an extremely skittish cat, but any normal feline should be fine.

Here are a couple of videos of her playing with Dog Mob on top of our parking garage. This is a fair representation of her play style, which shows a good degree of social skills and adaptability: she'll play chase as either the chaser or the chasee, she initiates play with both dogs and responds to their social cues, she's able to break off play in the second clip after Crooky rolls her roughly on the concrete around 0:19-0:21 instead of getting overaroused or responding with snaps/barks (which I read as a good sign, since it indicates to me that Anica is likely to respond to accidental rough treatment by trying to move away and get some breathing space -- a promising sign for placement with kids, provided the parents know how to read and respect her space-seeking behavior).

After a while they found a cicada. Pongu promptly dismissed it as pointless, Crookytail was initially fascinated but then sad because he thought he killed it with a paw swipe (he didn't, but he has a long and celebrated history of accidentally going Lenny on his little bug friends, so this was not an unreasonable assumption on his part), and Anica did... well, Anica did this:

Eventually she moved into Terrier-and-Rattlesnake Mode and started darting in to bite at the cicada, and after about another two-three minutes she finally killed the poor buzzy bug. (RIP parking garage cicada; you spent years as a blind buried larva dreaming of the sky, only to wind up as a dog toy for those clowns. Truly, life is filled with tragedy.)

Anyway what's interesting about Anica's behavior with the cicada was that she's obviously interested in it, but (I didn't tape this part, it was what happened after the video clip) she was perfectly capable of focusing on me and doing Sits even with the bug buzzing around behind her, and after she already knew that it was a Fascinating Plaything. If I had wanted her to leave the cicada alone, it would have taken no more than a couple of mild verbal "nopes" and redirection to another activity (playing with Crooky, working with me, even just walking away). Since I am a cruel and heartless person and didn't care if she ate the cicada, I let her have it, but it was heartening to see how easily she could be convinced to leave it alone.

So, again, based on that I'm thinking that she should be fine living in most households with most cats.

Other than that her training is going fine. Anica is shameless about mugging random people on the street for attention (she really wants to find a home), and I let her do that to a certain extent because who knows, maybe one of those people will happen to be looking for a dog (it's happened before!), but mostly I try to discourage that behavior because it's impolite and sometimes people encourage Anica to jump on them, which I very much don't want her to develop as a habit.

No potty accidents since last week. She's holding it through most of a workday at this point and is reliably pottying outside. Anica had a little bit of diarrhea yesterday (probably my fault for letting her join in the deck-grilling hamburger festival with Dog Mob) and was consistent about telling us via persistent squeaking when she needed to go outside, so that's a good development.

I'll post a training session with the next update. We're still reinforcing Sits on verbal cues (behavior is consistent but response time is slow, so I want to build up her confidence and reduce that delay before moving on to a new behavior) and working on introducing gradual distractions. I haven't done as much clicker shaping work as I'd hoped to, since potty training took priority last week and I've been too busy to do a whole lot beyond that, but it's next up on the list once we get those Sits a little more solid.

First Week With Anica

It's been almost a week since Anica came to stay with us, and she's beginning to relax into showing us a little more of her personality. We've started foundational clicker training, she's making good progress on a default Sit, and potty training is going quite nicely. Anica had one accident a day for each of her first three days here -- although she did make it a little closer to the door each time (to be fair, she never actually peed inside my house; all three accidents were in the condo foyer or stairwell on her way outside) -- and since the third day she's had no accidents at all.

This is a really, really nice little dog who will make a wonderful pet for some lucky owner.

At this point I feel safe saying that Anica has no major behavioral issues. She did cry a little in her crate on days 3-5 when I left to go to work or took the rest of Dog Mob out for a walk and left Anica alone in her crate, but it wasn't particularly intense (lasted maybe a couple of minutes, didn't escalate beyond whines and whimpers) and it's vanished now that she's gotten more comfortable in the house routine and confident that I'll be back eventually, so I would not categorize her as having separation anxiety or isolation distress. She's just a normal dog who worries a little when she's left alone in a semi-strange place without her semi-familiar person around. Once she gets settled in, I wouldn't expect her eventual adopter to have any real trouble with this.

She doesn't resource guard anything (food, toys, attention) from either people or other dogs. She does like to pick up random bits of garbage while out on walks, but she always drops them when given a gentle "no," and she's happy to trade her garbage treasures for cookies. My expectation is that if her adopter is consistent about not letting Anica keep her garbage treasures, this behavior will diminish and eventually disappear within a few weeks. I might have time to do that while she's here for fostering, and I might not; it mostly just depends how long it takes her to find a real home.

Anica's easily motivated by food, toys, praise, and personal play -- she likes playing the clicker game and she's willing to take rewards across the board, which makes for fun and effortless training sessions. She picked up Sit almost instantly and has it on a verbal cue already.

I'm doing a little clicker shaping instead of moving straight to Down and Stay, because that's more fun for me, but also because I'm hoping that Anica's adopters will continue to do tricks or recreational sport training with her, and in that case they'll probably be better served with a dog who's had some experience with shaping, rather than just lure-reward learning. So we'll see how that goes. Right now Anica doesn't quite seem to have grasped the concept, but she's got a good attention span and is willing to try as long as I'll let her.

Outside, Anica is playful and energetic. Inside, she's perfectly happy to sack out with a favorite toy on the dog bed. She has a great on/off switch, which is always nice to see and makes it much more likely that she'll do well in a pet home.

She continues to display excellent social skills with Dog Mob. I'd be comfortable placing her in a home with just about any kind of reasonably social resident dog. Anica is very easygoing when it comes to other dogs.

I'm a little less confident about cats or small pets, because Anica is a terrier and she does have a strong hardwired chase instinct. She'll go after squirrels and cats that she encounters on walks. However, she's also pretty easy to redirect and quick to shift her attention back to her person, so I think she could learn to live with a resident indoor cat as long as her owner was comfortable with doing a carefully supervised introductory period and the cat wasn't too skittish (a stable/confident cat should do just fine, but I don't think it would be fair to subject an extremely skittish cat to that stress). What I've seen so far is enough to keep me from making a blithe blanket statement that "oh she'll be fine with all cats ever," but I honestly don't see any reason that Anica couldn't live harmoniously with most cats, given a reasonably savvy owner and appropriate support during the adjustment phase.

All in all, so far Anica seems like a near-perfect dog. She sheds very little (I wouldn't say she's no-shed, but she doesn't drop much hair at all), she's not a barker, she's extremely affectionate and loves to cuddle, and she's happy and playful and likes lots of games. She's just an easy, fun little girl.

I'll post some videos of our training and play sessions next time.

Introducing Anica!

Yesterday we picked up Temporary Dog #28: a six-month-old female Border Terrier mix named Anica. Currently she's about 20 pounds, which means her adult weight is likely to come in at somewhere in the 25-27 pound range once she fills out and develops a little more muscle. At the moment she's a bit underweight, probably from shelter stress.

Anica landed in a North Carolina shelter when her previous owner, who had acquired her as a puppy, decided that he didn't have the time or energy for a dog. He dropped her off at the shelter, where she was pulled by our rescue partners and slated for transport up to PA. After a couple of weeks with our rescue partners, she made her way up here.

She's only been here for a little over 24 hours, so it's premature for me to try making any detailed evaluations at this point. So far, however, Anica seems to be a great little dog: affectionate, snuggly, gentle, and very very sweet. She's been sociable and polite with Dog Mob -- even though, as usual, Pongu's not making that easy for her. (Last night Pongu decided to rush up to Anica's crate and yell at her every single time he heard a noise he didn't like, whether or not it came from her. Pongu yelled at her for scratching, whining, and shifting position in her sleep, but he also yelled at her because there was a truck with squeaky brakes outside, or because Peter opened the bedroom door to use the bathroom, or because Pongu was having a bad dream and clearly that was all Anica's fault.)

The first order of business, as usual, has been potty training, crate training, and leash walking. I can't tell whether Anica has had any formal training on any of these points or if she's just a naturally easygoing dog; either way, she seems to be catching on pretty quickly. We did have a potty accident last night, but so far it's only been the one, and she's pottied outside pretty consistently since then. She's been mostly quiet in the crate apart from occasional sighs and complaints when she gets bored.

Anica has been fairly easy on leash -- I've just been walking her on a flat collar, no need for a front-clip harness so far -- and seems to be rapidly getting used to walks in the city, although she has shown a tendency to snap up dropped food on the sidewalks and I suspect she's going to be pretty interested in squirrels once she's a little more comfortable. But no big problems on that front, at least not in the first day.

My very broad preliminary assessment is that she's a sweet and easy dog with no major issues. Anica would be a good choice for a novice owner or for a family looking for a child-friendly pet. I think she could do well as either a second dog or an only pet; she's dog-social and enjoys playing with other dogs, but she doesn't seem to be overly needy. I haven't seen any signs of separation anxiety or resource guarding at this time (although SA sometimes needs a little longer to manifest; this early, she's not bonded to me and therefore doesn't get too worried when I'm not around).

So that's the first look at Anica. We'll start foundational training either tonight or tomorrow, and hopefully we'll be able to find a nice home for this little dog before too long.

Summer Vacation 2015

We're (probably) getting a new foster dog in a couple of days, so time to dust off the old dog blog! I haven't updated in a while because Pongu's no longer actively trialing (we took the year off Rally and our agility plans crashed and burned when I got sidetracked doing book stuff earlier this spring; we haven't really recovered from that setback, training-wise).

But everyone's still here and doing well otherwise. Here are some pictures from Dog Mob's summer vacation. We got back from Nantucket a couple of weeks ago. As ever, they had a great time and we can't wait to go back.