Candor Creek

Relaxed (but aware) at my feet. Vaccination day. Did much better than I anticipated given she boarded here a week ago; she didn't tremble once and gave only a single whine. Treats from the doc helped smooth that last bit out. Summer's been on anti-anxiety meds for a week now, long enough for canines to start seeing benefits (in humans is usually closer to two weeks). She never looked outright drugged but a couple times she seemed to be...figuring something out? Somewhat restless? She couldn't find a good spot to rest sometimes on the second and third days. A bit pacey, indicating mild stress, but no panting. On day three or four we ran into friends (including canine) on our walk. We were in the courtyard and mostly standing in her "problem spots" where the sound reverberates differently and sets off her extremely delicate noise sensitivity. This can be very high stress for her. I noticed, however, that while she was still distracted and orienting tow...

Current training spot. I'm experiencing the closest thing I've had to a proper outdoor autumn in four years thanks to a recent increase in meds, so I figured it was worth sharing. No geocaching or solitary hikes, of course, but I've at least been able to tolerate outdoor training with my dog underneath a pretty tree - as long as it's on a steroid day and immediately followed by a shower. No pics of Summer; she was highly stressed today and I do not believe in taking pics of stressed dogs unless it is for educational purposes. You'd think I'd be more self-conscious sitting in the middle of my apartment's courtyard with the possibility of all those neighbor eyes on me, but the goal of getting Summer comfortable is far too important to let that sort of thing slow me down. The job obliterates the paranoia. It always has.

We're starting to look like a team here. <3 I am currently in a dose adjustment for one of my mood stabilizers. This makes me oddly groggy and loopy, and sometimes by brain lurches and I drop phones or erase sections I've written - so the current entry likely is not composed to the point I wish it to be. It was a great assessment moment, though, and one I wanted to share. After becoming slightly more concerned by her continually present and fluctuating anxiety outdoors I did some further assessment and found that Summer's fits and starts of anxiousness and the trembling preceeding leaving the apartment are all actually just connected signs of sustained, chronic insecurity and fear and some lack of confidence in the management in the big, scary outdoors (the last bit is not surprising given we've only just hit the four month mark; my home is also very different from and much quieter than her others, and I am but one person in the face of Bad Things). The be...

Walk stress giving way to homecoming relief. Here's a long post for the Summer/canine behavior fan club. I cannot overstate how much I enjoy working a dog like Summer. Unpacking baggage and refolding everything with a dog is such a wonderful process - and it's so much more amazing and enriching when they're your own. Guiding them to their potential is magic. She threw me an interesting curveball this week: as soon as the weather changed a few days ago she became a fearful, trembling, disorganized mess anytime she was outdoors or we were getting ready to go out. We're back to crouching and zigzagging and sudden surges and cutting me off and refusing to go to the bathroom. It's a pretty spectacular reaction, and worrisome for her well-being. She comes from a comparable climate, so that alone should not be an issue. She now seems to be particularly scared of one area along our walk that we only cross into half the time, and the only possible oddity I can thin...

Among the crates. I use three crates. The first is the black wire drop-pin crate that is a permanent fixture in my home - even if a dog is comfortable loose while I am away. This is treated as a sanctuary, used as a spot to let that den instinct kick in, and my dogs have generally been comfortable going in there to snooze from time to time. It was fully taken apart, scrubbed, and cleaned before Summer came home; while I am sure I didn't get all traces of Storm off of it I wanted to get as much "stressed geriatric" smell off of it as I could. That's important. If you lock your dog in a crate that smells like the built-up panted saliva of a stressed, dementia-suffering geriatric they can smell that and may take cues from it, expecting something terrible to happen to them. The drop-pin construction sucks to put together but it's so much easier to clean fully in this situation. The Workhorse. The second crate is a soft-sided crate with hollow metal tube fr...