It’s adorably cheesy, but must be seen:

We’ll see how long it lasts this time…but, I was inspired to return to training. Because Caspian’s been showing signs of settling down as he’s gotten older, I think it’s worth testing the waters again with him around other dogs. And I’d love to be able to use Kaia sometimes with my clients’ dogs, so it seemed like a good plan to start bringing them both to work on Mondays (currently, my Sunday) for about half an hour in the evening to work in a nearby parking lot while dogs go home for the day.

This was the first Monday since the plan occurred to me, so at the moment I’m 1 for 1. I brought both dogs and worked with both dogs, and Caspian and I saw 1 (kind of 3) dogs with no barking. Woo hoo! A good start, for sure. » Read The Rest

…could have a dog who caused two days worth of veterinary visits and medical scares because he fell out of bed. My bed. Which he gets on and off of at least 3 times a day, and usually more. My bed that even has a step so that he and Kaia can get on and off of it safely.

Caspian managed to do just that. In fact, he injured his leg badly enough (or was such a big baby about said injury) that he would put no weight on his left hind leg, and we rushed him to the vet. The vet examined him, and with some surprise decided that the injury was in the tarsus (read: what passes for a dog’s ankle). My best guess is that he did his usual stretching routine, where he leaves his back legs on the bed and walks down onto the floor with his front paws. He probably walked forward too far and his back left leg came down off the bed onto the corner of the step. You know, the step that I put there in order to keep them safe while they get on and off the bed.

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All right. At the moment, we seem to be back to normal. The dogs just spent several minutes playing beautifully with no problem at all, and I didn’t see anything weird when I came in from work or when my stepfather came over to help me with a house problem. (It was exciting, I turned on the heater and it set off the smoke alarm. I’m oh-so-glad that the dogs don’t respond all that badly to the sound of the alarm, that could’ve created yet another issue.)

I do still plan to keep an eye on them, of course. But I’m starting to feel like we might be out of the woods. All the evidence is pointing to my guess that something scary happened while I wasn’t home, rather than a medical issue with my darling, cranky girl. That would make me very happy, of course! And we’re all about to get some nice de-stressing, because my wonderful boyfriend flies in on Sunday for a visit and I’m taking a long weekend. Yay! I can’t wait, and I know the dogs will be thrilled to see him as well. So, while I’ll keep an eye on everything, I’m feeling much less nervous than I was the day it happened, and apaprently so are they.

I went grocery shopping this morning before work. This was partly because I needed groceries, and partly because I wanted to see how the dogs would handle my leaving for a short time before I left for work. They were very vocal when they heard my car pull in, and I swear I heard Kaia do a low-level redirection onto Caspian when they heard the key turn in the lock. However, Caspian was his usual dopey, happy self when I came in, and she definitely didn’t hurt him at all.

Not exactly the totally low-key, every-day entrance and exit that I was really hoping for. But still, another sign that whatever it was seems to be diminishing. Last night, several of Kaia’s really scary things were totally silent. Not a good sign. Today, she was loud and growly. Much better, as far as the ongoing stability of their relationship together. And, since I didn’t really have any other option, I headed off for work and kept my fingers crossed.

And they were great! There was a normal amount of barking when I pulled in, and no sounds that make me think redirection was occuring. They gave me their usual greeting, with no signs of guarding or touchiness or escalated stress. They did both refuse to follow me into the bathroom (I figured it would be a good test, since I thought they were nervous about it yesterday and that’s where most of the stuff fell), but came in after a little bit of coaxing. Even there, they were fine with each other.

So, yay! We seem to be back to normal. I still want to keep an eye on Kaia in case there’s something medical going on, but we seem to be back to life as usual. I hope it stays that way.

So, last night we had a ‘big behavioral anomaly’ from Kaia. Which is making me decidedly nervous. She got very upset with Caspian, to the point that she was guarding me (and later a coworker) from him, and telling him off at almost every chance she got. Sure, she’s often cranky with him, but I’ve never seen her take it so far, and every time I’ve seen her get annoyed in the past she’s forgiven him very quickly. She was also very whiny with me, which is unusual – I couldn’t tell if it was pain or stress, but it didn’t seem related to any particular body part.

I was worried enough that I called a coworker over to give me a second opinion. I immediately jumped to the idea that there had to be some sort of trigger for the behavioral issue, since I’m pretty confident I would have seen signs of escalation before yesterday if it was purely behavioral in nature. This left me with two possibilities: something happened when I was at work, or Kaia was in pain or had some other medical issue going on.

I was on the fence about taking her to the vet, and knew that I would need a second pair of hands if I did. I didn’t want to take them both in the car if she was being so touchy around him, and I didn’t want to leave Caspian at home alone if I could avoid it. I called several vets, and got a general consensus of “you can bring her in if you feel strongly about it, but we don’t even know what sort of tests we’d run based on the symptoms of ’suddenly doesn’t like her brother as much as she did this morning.’” Which pretty much took the vet visit out of the options for the moment. I don’t have the money to ask them to do broad-spectrum testing for something that may or may not be veterinary in nature.

So, said coworker and I hung out and observed them for a while. They weren’t behaving totally normally – Kaia was a little clingier with me than usual, still guarding things that she doesn’t usually guard, and I think a little lethargic. This still didn’t help us narrow anything down, though, as all of those symptoms could be due to emotional or physical stress. Still, the issues seemed to be dying down, rather than escalating, so eventually my very kind helper went home, leaving the dogs to nap and me to worry.

And consider various small details, and arrive at a possible answer that I like much, much better than medical issues on the horizon. I remembered that, when I first got home from work, I noticed a few things had fallen off of shelves. Some of the things on the shelf in my shower had fallen into the bathtub, and a few little things were on the floor in the bedroom that I thought had been on my bedside table before I left for work. Which got me looking around online. Sure enough, we had a few small earthquakes today.

None of them were big enough that things should have fallen down, but if they somehow made my house shake even though they weren’t very big, it would have been my dogs’ first earthquake(s). Definitely scary enough to warrant some weird behaviors, and we do know from past experience that Kaia will redirect aggression onto canine family members when stressed or frightened. Could that explain it?

I sure hope so. But I can tell you, I’ve been keeping a close eye on them this morning and I plan to continue to do so. So far, I haven’t seen anything that worries me. We’ve had a normal slow morning in which everyone sleeps in and lazes around, and I didn’t see any signs of guarding while they were both on the bed with me getting pets. I want to make a point of writing any observations for the next few days here, so that I have them written down if I need to go back and look for patterns. So hey, maybe I’ll actually blog for a while!

Look what we found while working on the computer that belongs to the executive director where I used to work!

That is my adorable boy, probably right around 4 months of age. This picture was taken shortly before he came to me as a foster dog, and the rest (yay for cliches!) is history. He was a beautiful, gangly, silly looking, adorable puppy. And he’s exactly the same as an adult, and I still love him to death. Even when he drives me nuts.

The APDT conference was an awesome experience. It had ups and downs, of course, but it was a ton of fun overall. I’m still processing stuff, and I’m definitely not awake and aware enough to write about it at the moment. That, and there’s an adorable no-longer-a-puppy licking my nose, and a wonderfully sweet chow mix lying on my foot begging belly rubs. I’m going to go give the dogs some long overdue love and attention!

I arrive in Louisville, KY at 11:59pm tonight! I can’t wait to see my friends from Colorado, and to introduce them to some of my coworkers from California. I’m feeling totally unprepared for this trip, though – this will be my first year at APDT where I don’t already have a good idea which seminars I want to attend! I usually print everything out ahead of time, to go over my options and coordinate with the other people who are attending.

I’m really looking forward to the tour of the Louisville Zoo, that’s going to be a ton of fun. I’m also looking forward to being done with the traveling part – not really a great outlook, since the traveling part hasn’t even started! I used to travel really easily, but these days I get queasy on the plane,and it’s hard not to get impatient at delays.

I’m all packed, and the house looks as clean as I’m going to get it. Super Shuttle will be here in an hour, so I’m enjoying some quiet time with the dogs. A coworker is coming to stay with them, and I know it’ll go just fine. They’re always really well behaved for pet sitters, sometimes better than they are for me! And it’ll be good preparation, since this particular coworker is on a wait-list for a puppy of her own. Caspian might be 4 years old, but life with Cas still has a lot of similarities to life with a puppy.

I don’t think they’ve realized I’m leaving today. I have a new suitcase, and I think they haven’t made the same connection that they had to me packing up the old one. Both of them are acting like it’s a normal quiet day, and we’re currently enjoying some cuddling time on the couch. It’s so enjoyable, I think I’m going to stop blogging and go curl up with the pets. I’m thinking I’ll try to post with my thoughts from the conference, if I have time.

Saw this on spotted dog farm, and thought it was interesting.

Yesterday was…strange. Caspian impressed me, and in very good ways. Kaia and I had an up and down day yesterday, but I do have to say that there were more ups than downs.

First, the good: Kaia and I graduated Canine High School yesterday, tied for 1st place with 4 of our 5 classmates. I love the graduation games we play there: we’re given a task (can your dog crawl 5 feet forward, will your dog maintain a stand stay while you hop on one foot 5 times, can your dog stand on his hind legs for at least 1 second) and we have a limited amount of time to achieve it. Each dog/handler pair who achieves the goal gets a point, and we move onto the next goal.

If the behavior is on cue, then it’s easy peasy. If it’s not, you can get creative with ways to elicit the behavior. Any form of gentle (or non-gentle) physical manipulation is out, but anything else is allowed. Lots of us lured our dogs to weave through our legs, for example. To be perfectly fair, Kaia and I had an advantage: with so much more experience in training classes, many of the tricks given as challenges were things she already has on cue. I’m also completely thrilled with the reliability of her ’stays’ and ‘freezes,’ she aced those challenges completely.

All right…now that I’ve had a nice brag, trouble with Kaia (and bizarreness with Caspian) will follow the jump. » Read The Rest