2012 in Fosters - A Retrospective

As 2012 winds to a close, it's time to reflect on the foster dogs who came through this house in the past year.

Just like in 2011, all our fosters came from Southern states: Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. They were adopted out all across the country: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Wisconsin, and Vermont are homes to our fosters now.

Here are the fosters we housed in the past twelve months.

1. Crookytail the Benevolent, RL1 (January 2012)
The One Who Stayed

Crookytail was my first pull from Robeson County, North Carolina. RCAS and neighboring Sampson County became the focus of my rescue efforts in 2012, in part because Liberty County's rescue team became so successful that their shelter's save rate went from 2% to 98%, and thus all the dogs I wanted to pull were spoken for before I got to them. Also, I'd gotten more confident about my ability to pick out good dogs instead of relying on other people to choose them for me.

Thus began the Era of Crookytail, in which he added his considerable talents to our fostering team, and everything got way better than it had ever been before. All the fosters start smiling in their pictures a lot more once Crooky joins the team.

This year, Crookytail went from a dog with absolutely no formal training to a titled Rally Obedience dog. Granted, he didn't love the sport and is retiring as a RL1, but I'm still proud of him, and in 2013 he'll be able to get back to his real job: guidance counselor to foster dogs.

2 and 3. Jackie and Erin (March 2012)
The Trailer Park Kids

After Crooky joined us as a permanent dog, I did puppies for a while because I didn't think I could handle three full-sized dogs. Little did I know that puppies are actually a WAY bigger pain in the ass. Jackie and Erin, the two on the right in that picture, were the first of our foster puppies. They were "found" in a cardboard box in a trailer park (in reality, the person who claimed to have "found" them was probably their owner who just didn't want to be held responsible for dumping a litter of puppies).

Because dogs in Robeson County frequently get no preventative care or vaccinations whatsoever, both of these puppies came down with parvo a few days after I pulled them. They had to go into the doggy ICU and get IVs for a few days. All told, their vet care cost about a thousand bucks, and Erin died anyway. Jackie survived and made it to Philly. She got adopted two days later.

4 and 5. Cerise and Razzmatazz (March - April 2012)
The Burnout Babies

I'll tell you a secret: even the best foster parents don't always love all their dogs.

These two were my least favorite fosters ever. It wasn't their fault, but I still never liked them very much. They had sarcoptic mange and were being treated with lime-sulfur dips, so they smelled terrible and I had to give them medicine four times a day and wash my hands every time I touched them and Dog Mob had to take preventative medicine too. Because they were itchy and miserable, they just wailed constantly and scratched all the time and were basically impossible to train. Because they were hound mixes, their wailings were LOUD, which did not endear them to me, as we live in a condo and our next-door neighbor was a doctor who was eight or nine months pregnant at the time and already not sleeping well.

We had these puppies for two weeks, then Cerise got adopted and Razz went to go stay with a lady who was fostering one of her other littermates.

6 and 7. Indy and Little Fox (April - May 2012)
The Melon Collies

These two little monsters were a couple of collie mixes that I pulled from North Carolina. Their mother was a collie mix; their fathers were probably two different dogs. Little Fox's father was definitely a German Shepherd (her owners were kind enough to tell the shelter staff that as they were dumping the mother), but Indy's father was most likely a yellow Lab or Lab mix.

A friend of ours decided to adopt Indy (the beige one), so I kept her a couple more weeks for basic training and put Little Fox up for adoption. Little Fox got adopted by a very nice older couple in Bucks County. Indy lives in Alabama with our friend now, where she eats his furniture and destroys his remote controls and is generally a massive troublemaker. I told him that was going to happen, but he insisted he wanted the tomboy and not the polite little lady, so that's what he gets.

After those two left, I decided I was never doing puppies again. NEVER.

8. Mab (June - July 2012)
The Smart One

That summer, some more friends decided that they wanted to adopt a dog, so they contacted us for help picking one out. I sent them a couple of possible candidates and they chose Mab, a little black border collie in RCAS. Mab got out of the shelter with about 90 minutes to spare. She turned out to be the smartest foster we've ever had -- just ridiculously quick to learn and easy to train. If she hadn't already been promised to our friends, I would have been sorely tempted to keep her, but as is I'm just delighted that she went on to such a good home. She lives in Vermont now and has a wonderful extended family of dogs.

9. Eldwin/Etta (August 2012)
The Happy One

Eldwin, who was later renamed Etta, was another foster dog that I was briefly tempted to keep. She was a little shepherd mix who came out of RCAS and also proved to be super smart, as well as happy and smiley and instantly endearing. Luckily she got an adoption commitment from a dream home with a young couple in Philly within two or three days of arrival, so I could file her away mentally as "taken" and stop myself from getting too attached. She was only with us for ten days, and it's a good thing, too. Any longer and she might never have left.

10. Tulip (August 2012)
The Short-Term Pee Sprinkler

I barely got to know Tulip, a beagle mix from SCAS who was in and out of here in less than 48 hours. She was sweet, but really timid and a major submissive urinator. Crookytail helped bring her around, and she showed a good bit of improvement in the short time she was here, but we didn't really have enough time to fix that issue, because Tulip got adopted almost immediately. Hooray, less pee mopping for me.

11. April (August - September 2012)
The Good Mama

April was a soft-hearted, gentle black Lab/border collie mix from rural Tennessee, where she had been found outside a branch bank with her daughter Scarlett. The local rescue hadn't been able to get her adopted, so they sent her and a few other dogs to my rescue group. Scarlett got adopted immediately (puppies always go first), one of our friends and his wife decided to adopt April soon after she got here, and I got to deal with the toughest potty-training case I've been faced with so far.

I owe a lot to the magic powers of Crookytail on this one. With his help, April was brought out of her depression and given a crash course in remedial socialization and successfully started on potty-training. She now lives with two cats in Wisconsin and is a very lucky dog. It turns out that she loves snow, which is good, because she'll be getting a lot of it out there.

12. Shelby/Sydney (October - November 2012)
The Box Dog

Shelby, later renamed Sydney, was yet another mama dog who sat in the shelter after her puppies had been adopted (although in Sydney's case, only one of her puppies actually got adopted -- the other died, probably of hookworms, before his adopters could pick him up). Although she was smart and sweet and blessed with exotic markings, no one seemed to want her. On her last day, the shelter director sent out a plea across Facebook for someone to pull this special little dog.

She was in rough shape when I pulled her; she was severely underweight and had a massive parasite load, including heartworms. Luckily, other generous people had been touched by the director's plea and donated hundreds of dollars to cover Sydney's medical bills. Even so, she had to spend a full month on crate rest before she could go up for adoption.

But Sydney came through heartworm treatment like a champ and proved to be an adaptable, friendly, quick-learning dog who went on to a great home in upstate New York with three other dogs. She was another one that I wanted to keep, because she was smart and had great hind-end awareness and a really nice natural side pass, but alas, I can't have three dogs. And she scored an excellent home, so I'm pretty happy with that.

And that is the recap of 2012 in foster dogs. In just a few more weeks, we'll saddle up to start again in 2013. Crookytail is excited and Pongu is filled with loathing at the prospect of bringing in some new foster fuzzbutts. I'm already scouting for prospects.

Adieu to the Burnout Babies

On Friday we bid the Burnout Babies farewell.

Cerise got adopted by a very nice family who saw her videos on Youtube, fell in love, and drove two hours from New Jersey to adopt her. She is going to live on a mountain (who knew they even had mountains in New Jersey? Not I!) with four dogs next door to play with.

Razz remains in foster care, but I'm confident she'll find a forever home soon. She's too good not to.

A part of me wishes that I could have kept Razz a little longer to continue working with her (and, selfishly, because it's a lot easier to handle one puppy than two, if only because the potty messes are halved), but lack of time and lack of space dictated that she move on.

In the future, whenever possible, I won't take fosters with a fixed time limit. It's just not the best way to do things. At all.

But what's done is done, and this ends the Burnout Babies' chapter here.

Pongu doesn't miss them a bit, of course, but I think Crookytail does.

(I like this video. I think the end is poignant. Off they romble, continuing their merry adventures off-screen, and all Crookytail can do is watch them go on without him.)

Winding Down the Burnout Babies

The Burnout Babies are nearing the end of their time here.

Tomorrow they'll head out for another adoption event, this time at PetSmart. Hopefully they'll find their forever families... but even if they don't, they'll be packing up their tiny suitcases and heading elsewhere. I committed to pulling two other puppies before fostering the Burnout Babies; Razz and Cerise came to stay with us as short-termers only because I had a two-week window between Jackie and these guys, and figured that two weeks in foster care was better than nothing. But now the two weeks are up, and the new pups are coming, and that means the Burnout Babies have got to move on, just as they've finally started to settle in.

I spent a lot of time designing new distraction games for these guys. As they recover from mange, they're getting more energetic, which means they need a constant supply of new things to investigate/chew on/destroy to keep themselves occupied. All their meals come stuffed into one toy or another: kibble goes into a Kong wobble pin for dispensing or is hidden in paper balls to be torn up, dog stew is served in frozen "popsicle" blocks, and peanut butter comes in empty paper towel tubes so the puppies can shred the cardboard to earn their prize.

They also get the occasional half-cooked chicken foot, which is small enough to fit into puppy mouths and lasts them a good 15-20 minutes as a chew toy. The Burnout Babies love chicken feet. Given half a chance, Razz will steal Cerise's and hoard both of them in her secret ninja hideout, chewing chicken toes contentedly while her sister cries in the puppy pen.

Training-wise, they have conquered Sit.

Here's Razz doing indoor drills (Sit --> move --> Sit --> move --> Sit) to increase response speed and reinforce the verbal cue. The quicker she follows me and Sits, the quicker she can do it again and earn another treat. Rapid-fire repetitions are one way of increasing speed and reliability in a fairly short time.

She anticipates me once at 0:20, but at this stage that's a pretty good problem to have. Sit is becoming the Burnout Babies' default behavior; they are learning to offer it whenever they want something and don't know what else to do. They're showing signs of (very slightly) improved self-control, and this definitely beats the "jump up and down and yowl at the top of your lungs" behavior they offered before. Not that they've quit yowling, alas.

Outdoor drills this morning:

This is the first time I put the Burnout Babies together and asked them both to Sit. In almost all the previous clips, they are separated: I work with one puppy in the kitchen while the other waits (and usually wails) in the puppy pen. Only at this relatively late stage, when they're being proofed to a bunch of other distractions including sticks, leaves, winds, and car alarms, is it reasonable for me to ask each puppy to focus while the other is in the picture -- and even then, about half the time they got distracted playing with one another instead of listening to me.

When that happened, I would gently separate them again and ask them to focus briefly. One successful repetition and they were clicked, treated, and allowed to play -- so that playing with each other became part of the reward for a successful response. After a few repetitions, their focus improved greatly, but I still wouldn't expect them to get it right the first time at this stage.

I post all these clips of the Burnout Babies practicing Sit not because it's so interesting to watch them put their butts on the ground over and over again (although I suppose it might be of interest to know their current state of training if you're thinking of adopting one of these guys), but to show the progression of teaching and proofing a relatively simple behavior. As basic as Sit is, it took over a week of work before these puppies could reasonably be considered to "know" it... and they still need a good bit of proofing before they'll be reliable in new environments.

Teaching the Burnout Babies Sit

Well, we're home from today's adoption event, and while plenty of older dogs got some interest -- which was fantastic, as adult and adolescent dogs generally have a much tougher time landing permanent homes -- neither of the Burnout Babies found their forever families this afternoon. So they are back here with us, squatting in the puppy pen for another week, and since we've got them a little longer than anticipated, I'm continuing with the puppy program.

Today, after another two sessions each, they progressed to a (weak) verbal cue on Sit.

After the second session, the Burnout Babies were both responding to an empty hand target, which I was able to fade into a hand signal that same session. In the third session, I preceded the hand signal with a verbal cue. Over time, this teaches the dog to anticipate the hand signal from the verbal cue alone -- in effect, the dog learns that the verbal cue is a prompt to do the Sit behavior. (This is much much faster than the old method I was using, which was to do the verbal cue and hand signal at the same time. Verbal cue followed by hand signal is literally twice as fast as doing them simultaneously.)

Here's Cerise on her third session of learning Sit:

At this stage, the verbal cue is meaningless to her, but she responds to the hand signal readily.

At 0:20, she spits out the treat. These are moderately high-value treats (Wellness WellBites jerky treats), but Cerise just isn't a very food-motivated dog. Thus, for the fourth session, I adjusted and used a toy motivator instead of food rewards.

In the fourth session, the Burnout Babies went to a straight verbal cue:

It takes her a few seconds to respond to the prompt, but eventually she does so correctly. This time, instead of a food reward (which wouldn't be very rewarding to her), I let her play a quick game of tug with an old sock. This is also why I'm not using the marker word "Yes!" or a click, since those sounds only signal food rewards.

(NB: I do not recommend using your socks as tug toys routinely, unless you want to teach your dog that all your socks are in fact dog toys and fair game for destruction. I'm doing so in this clip only because I had no other toys available -- the Burnout Babies had chewed up or peed all over everything else I could give them -- and this particular sock had been living in the dog-toy drawer for over a year, since I had been using it to muffle the clicker for a previous sound-sensitive dog. So this sock smelled like a dog toy rather than a normal article of clothing, and I judged it would not be too confusing to the puppies.)

So that's where we are on Sit. The Burnout Babies have learned to respond to a verbal cue (which is the point at which most pet owners would probably be willing to say "this dog knows Sit"), but it's not especially strong and I doubt it would stand up to much distraction. We'll work on improving speed, reliability, and concentration in whatever time we have left.

We also started baby steps toward a recall. Here's one of the beginning exercises:

(As a preface to the exercise, note how distracted Razz is by itchy mange in the beginning. I have to tap her shoulder to get her attention and make her stop scratching. These puppies are really fighting an uphill battle to concentrate on anything other than how miserable they are right now, and I try to adjust my expectations accordingly.)

In this clip, I tossed a piece of kibble away so that Razz would chase it and give me some distance. If she'd been willing to eat the kibble and return, we could have played Kibble Toss, as I did with Jackie, and the opportunity to chase after a new piece of kibble would have been enough reward to keep her returning to me and then running away again.

However, while Razz is ordinarily fairly food-motivated, we did this session only an hour or so after the puppies had dinner, so she was pretty full and not that interested in eating more plain kibble. She chases it down, but it's obvious that this isn't much of a reward for her right now.

I had better food in store to use as a reward if she came back to me, but she ignored my initial calls because sniffing the floor was more interesting to her. That's okay; we don't have much of a relationship yet and I wouldn't expect her to come back to me instantly. Getting up and moving drew her curiosity, and at that point she comes back and earns a click. And that's fine! At this stage, you want to set the dog up for success, so do whatever it takes to make her come back, or even look back in your direction. Wave a tug sock around, make weird noises, tap your fingers on the floor, dance around. Whatever it takes to get some kind of beginning you can build on.

And then reward that return. And do it again. And again.

Burnout Babies: Week One

It's been a week since the Burnout Babies came to stay with us, and tomorrow they'll head back out for an adoption event with Wags, so with any luck they'll find forever homes and our time with them will be at an end.

My early impressions of their personalities seem to have been more or less borne out by the intervening days. Razz is the smart, serious one, while Cerise is a cuddly little clownbaby and a bit of a drama queen.

I discovered that Razz is also a secret potty ninja. She doesn't like to potty inside the puppy pen, because that's where she eats and sleeps. Instead, she's learned to climb out of the puppy pen, potty on the floor outside, and then climb back in when her business is done.

It took me way too long to figure out what she was doing, but by the second or third mess on the living-room floor a belated lightbulb went off in my head and I started putting a weewee pad outside the pen to make both our lives easier.

Shortly after that, I caught her in action:

So that's where we are on the getting-to-know-each-other front. They're settling down and much less aggravating than they were at first, but they're still messy noisy puppies, and Pongu still does not like them one bit.

On the training end, we didn't do a ton of work over the past week, in part because the Burnout Babies continued to be distracted by mange and itching (although it's gotten considerably better over the past few days) and in part because I've mostly been working with my own mutts lately.

A couple of days ago I started platform training Pongu and Crookytail on a makeshift platform of two boardgame boxes taped together, with the end goal of teaching tuck sits and other improved position changes. So that's been occupying most of my time (it is really hard to find a good tutorial on tuck sits, btw; I've found plenty of demos on what the final product looks like, but not a lot on how you get it). I think I've floundered my way toward a workable training program, but it remains to be seen whether I'm actually on the right track.

So the Burnout Babies have definitely gotten the short end of the stick in training time, but we still managed to get a few things done.

Their Sits have progressed to an intermediate stage between empty-hand luring and a more formal hand signal:

(That's Cerise yowling in the background, loudly unhappy because it's not her turn to play the fun games and she has to sit in the puppy pen all alone. Her caterwauling is a constant in almost all my Razz clips and is why I haven't uploaded more of them.)

At the end of this clip, woeful Mr. Starfish makes an appearance and gets his legs chewed on. Cerise is only moderately food-motivated but loves playing biteytoy, so I'm trying to build that drive by letting her play tug with poor mangled Mr. Starfish during the training breaks. (Puppies have a pretty short attention span and need lots of play breaks between repetitions, but there's no reason you can't use those "breaks" to secretly train some more.)

We've also been doing a little socialization work. Here's a quick food bowl exercise:

The glass bowl contains a higher-value food than the puppies normally receive (it's the dog stew that Pongu and Crookytail eat, not the puppy kibble that the Burnout Babies get for their usual meals). While they're eating it, I gently pat their backs and talk to them so that they become accustomed to noise and contact while they eat and associate these things with extra-good food. The point of this exercise is to act as a low-level preventative against resource guarding and/or snappiness when disturbed at mealtimes. (The puppies don't seem to care at all about me doing it, so it's not much to look at, but this is exactly what you want: no reaction.)

And that's where we are at the end of Week One.

Introducing the Burnout Babies

Last Sunday afternoon we picked up our latest fosters from WAGS: two of the six puppies in the "Crayola" litter, so dubbed because each of the puppies is named after a crayon color. These six pups came from The Maggie Society, one of our rescue partners in North Carolina. Their mom was a treeing walker coonhound; dad's a mystery.

Ours are Cerise (tricolor black/white/tan) and Razzmatazz (black with white dot on chin). Both are female, about eight weeks old, and suffering from sarcoptic mange.

And both of them are loud. The first day they squalled nonstop at earsplitting volume about losing their littermates, being all itchy with mange, and having to choke down nasty pills. Also they'd just gotten their first lime-sulfur dip that morning, so they smelled fantastic. Really, if you've never had two incontinent shrieking puppies making your entire house reek of sulfur dip and dog pee, you are missing out.

I promptly dubbed them the Burnout Babies, because damn if they didn't burn me out on fostering within twelve hours of their arrival.

It's been a couple of days now and things are getting better -- they're (slightly) quieter, the itching has subsided enough for us to start working on some training foundations, and the sulfur smell is wearing off -- but boy howdy it's exhausting having these two around. I cannot wait for them to get adopted.

I just hope adopters are willing to look past the crusty scabby bald spots and see how sweet these two pups are. Because they are sweet dogs, under all the mangy misery, and they deserve good homes of their own.

Razz is slightly larger than her sister and is the calmer, more athletic, and more assertive of the two. I think she's a little bit smarter, too. She has figured out how to climb out of the puppy pen, whereas her sister has no clue how to escape.

Cerise is smaller, flightier, and friendlier (although they're both very friendly pups). She squeaks more often but not as loudly. I think she's the funnier of the two -- she has some amazingly goofy expressions and seems to have a clownier personality overall.

Here they are doing some foundations:

I doubt I'll make too much progress with these guys. They're very young, the mange is a constant distraction, and I don't expect to have them for long. We can't do a ton of socialization, either, since they're contagious and it would be irresponsible to let them wander around outside where they'd come into close proximity to other dogs.

But, as ever, we'll do what we can.