Henry and Eo are doing pretty well, all things considered. We’ve gone two weeks now without Eo reacting negatively to Henry. As I posted below about the Wellness Simple food, Henry’s stomach is on the mend and he’s happily filling my backyard with little solid logs of poo.

Eo’s doing OK, but I had to push her Rimadyl dose up. I may have to up it again. We’re probably headed back to surgery within a month or two. I’m trying to figure out how to schedule it around any traveling I was planning to do to see relatives at Christmas — Eo may spend Christmas at the vet’s having her other hip done. Not fun. But patently better than the grinding I can feel through her skin over her right hip.

One of Eo’s main problems that I’m trying to get a handle on is her reactivity to Henry in certain situations, like when he enters a room or is laying in a spot she likes. He’ll happily defer to her. If — and that’s a very large if — she lets him before she attacks. She doesn’t draw blood in the attack, but she sounds terrifying, definitely pinches and grabs tufts of fur, and he is definitely and appropriately terrified of her. I think I’ve finally gotten the message through her thick skull that reacting that way is NOT appropriate behavior by combining positive control (aka: “Don’t let it happen!”) with positive reinforcement.

You can take the business process analyst out of the factory, but you can’t always take the factory out of the business process analyst. It helps me to track data about her behavior — for example, how long it’s been since she acted aggressively towards Henry. We now have a “Days Since a Lost Fur Incident” sign on the fridge. Every day she goes without acting aggressive, I get to stick another Post-It with a higher number on it.

We were up to six days this week until Henry sniffed at a Kong that Eo wasn’t quite done with. She didn’t actually manage to get to him (I stopped her and put her in a down-stay) but he yelped in fear and ran under the table — and I dutifully reset the clock to 0. One of these days I’ll get a week of peace.

I feel like a complete dork for making this post, but — Henry, for the first time in at least three months and probably a year, has had consistently solid stool for three days running. What did it? I switched him from Innova Adult to Wellness Simple Venison and Rice … I think he thought it was bland at first, but the difference was immediate and obvious.

Also, he stayed in his crate quietly for an entire 8 hour workday today. Talk about a day of accomplishments for him… and one hell of a lot of relief for me.

All of the photos are linked to the full res size in her flickr gallery, and I suggest clicking through — the clarity, sharpness, and timing of the photos is amazing.

Fruitables were developed by a clinician/nutritionist at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine, and I was given a couple of samples by a friend. I’m happy to report that the kids loved them to a tail-wagging extreme.

When looking at training treats, there’s three things I look at. The first is ingredients and caloric content. (Pupperoni? Bad. Our usual 100% dried chicken chips / cheap lunch meat? Good.) The second is smell. The smell of the treat has to be SUPER DUPER so that the kids will want them even when they can’t see them. Remember, I’m training a couple of dogs that are mixed hounds at best and exclusively sighthound at worst. The final thing is portability. This is where the wonderful cheap lunch meat, which is usually well-regarded, fails — it’s hard to separate the pieces, it’s hard to control how much I have with me in my training pouch, and if left out or on a long training “exercise” (aka a day at the office for public desensitization / socialization) … well, it’s better if you have a refrigerator, ifyaknowwhatImean.

If you can’t find them at your local pet store yet, you can order them from Amazon.com. There’s several varieties available:

• Pumpkin & Blueberry
• Pumpkin & Banana
• Pumpkin & Apple
• Pumpkin & Graham
• Canned Dry Food Supplement - For mixing with / supplementing your dog’s dry food.

My only wish, which has been communicated back to to Dr. Bauer, is for smaller bits. The 9 calorie cookies are great, but it was too easy to go through them quickly. I ended up (approximately) quartering the cookies for our training session. He responded to my email by saying that they had heard that (and also had found in the process that birds greatly enjoy the treats) and were planning to produce something along those lines in the future.

I picked up this Delta shower head at Home Depot for $49 last month. Money well spent. It’s winter here in Texas now (for the northerners in the audience — that means it’s 80F during the day and gets down to a bone-chilling mid-50s F during the night) and that means that the dogs get bathed inside because their human’s turned into a wuss.

I’m a little skeptical of the amount of plastic that’s in it’s construction — ok, it’s entirely plastic — but we’ll see how it holds up over time. Our water’s REALLY high in salts and minerals. There’s three inline filter screens, and the main/default water stream comes from little rubberized jets which don’t seem to be susceptible so far to the amazing clogging power of central Texas aquifer water.

On the other hand, the six foot no-kink cord is nice, and it’s very refreshing to be able to rinse the dogs off completely without having to use cups and splashes and then still having their coats be half-full of shampoo when we get out of the shower. It’s also made cleaning the inevitable small mountain of fuzz, mud, and dog hair that builds up on every surface in the shower very, very easy.

If you are a dog owner and you do NOT have this shower head or something similar for bathing the mutts, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

• Infants (he belly crawled up to her and licked her toes and made her laugh)
• Rambunctious pre-teens (mutts are durable!)
• Cats (Cat wasn’t so sure about him, though.)
• Bunnies (Took one sniff, the bunnies ears moved, and he backed off with a “WTF?!” expression!)
• Fish (He didn’t try to jump in the pond and eat them like Eo would’ve.)

We still need to work on generalizing “don’t jump on people” and “no begging for food”, but those are easy in comparison to the problems we dodged above.

However, the rain showers in the backyard loosened up some of the dirt, and loosening up some of the dirt meant that Eowyn and Henry running and playing turned some of the yard into mud… or really, red clay. Which meant they tracked mud into the house. Mud isn’t allowed in the house since we have white berber carpeting… which meant that I had to pick Eo up and give her a bath.

When she was a baby, we called her “Munch Rat” because she was always chewing on something and had a tiny little skinny tail. She came out of the bath looking like a drowned rat and wouldn’t let me dry her head off. I provide for you, in full color, the Drowned Munchrat!

The walk started out as a disaster. Every last thing that Eo is reactive to, from joggers to other dogs, arrived at once, right as we went out the door. And every time I got her calmed down again, another one would appear. I almost turned around and went back in — especially when I saw the woman walking the hellaciously reactive border collie that lived at the end of my block towards me. I know for sure that I let a few choice words escape my lips. (In a calm, quiet tone, of course.)

I’m not sure if tonight was the culmination of two YEARS of training Eowyn, or if it was just that I got REALLY stubborn and pissed off at the dogs, and managed to focus and control the seething grumblies in a way that led to success. Either way, I managed to do the “dances with dogs” training exercise tonight to a point where not only were both dogs doing it and doing it well, but we were actually having fun with it! Eowyn was heeling on lead (a first!) and only halfway reacted when a woman with some other dogs was walking them out to get the mail.

(For those not following along at home — Dances With Dogs is what I call the “lots of quick direction changes” training — it’s intended to teach a dog that consistently pulls and doesn’t watch the handler to heel on lead. Eowyn has pulled since the day she was born. Tonight was the FIRST night I have ever had her watching me and ignoring other people, dogs, and for ’scary things’ to jump out from under every car.)

The change was in my attitude. I don’t know how to describe it, but we’ve been working a lot on “calming” activities recently. I’ve been working to control my behavior, and I’ve been working to get the dogs to reliably get excited or slow down. The purpose of any command from the handler should be to calm the dog and focus their energy on the task at hand. (Thank you, Jennie.) That’s what I’ve been missing all these years. Sheesh.