Is the Trouble Past, or Developing?
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!