Candor Creek

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...

Behold: Summer's video premiere. Initially I was going to just post this without explanation on my Facebook and call it a day (I have not been in a writing or, indeed, communicating mood as of late) but I realized that this was an exquisite teaching moment. The video itself is about 15 seconds long, but it packs a lot of lessons into a tiny space. Below I will briefly discuss guarding behavior and the role of this particular exercise and, finally, how the activity can be used to cultivate trust and enhance bond. WARNING: below I will be discussing, but not coaching, an exercise that could be dangerous in certain situations and result in injury to a person if not properly coached or supervised by a behaviorist. What is written below is NOT personalized advice and should not be taken as such. The video above shows me doing an exercise with Summer (my three-year-old rehome, home for nearly two months now) and her favorite plaything. The reason I am making a point of doing it is...

Chillin'. About a month ago, a week after bringing her home, I tried a plug-in pheromone product for Summer with the aim of relieving at least some of her overall anxiety while I walked her through her new home, surroundings, and schedule. After a few days of use I thought I saw some evidence that it was taking the slightest edge off of it but I couldn't say for sure whether it was due to the product or simple passage of time with continued training and support. I left it plugged in and kept notes. The vial was due for a change on Monday. Over the past few days I thought she was getting a little more hypervigilant but, really, it was just subtle stuff that one would only have a hope of seeing if one spent their days with her. Noises on TV or bangs elsewhere in the apartment building started interrupting her rest again, causing her to lift her head in alarm (but not jump as she had at first). Her movement patterns changed slightly. This morning she seemed just slightly ...