@ December 1-6, 2007
With Lilly's diagnosis in the bag, and Marilyn and I coping with the adjustment, life moved on. Much of this life involved walking Lilly in various places; Marilyn's neighborhood, my apartment complex, and exploring Marilyn's backyard. A 1/2 hour session with Matt at the SPCA showed us the merits of using a gentle leader to walk Lilly. Gentle leaders are all the rage these days, as they offer the training benefits of a choke collar without the pressure on the neck. This was especially important in Lilly's case, as any constrictive pressure on her neck can send her into spit-up spasms that can be pretty stressful. The Gentle Leader avoids that, if a dog strains against the leash their head is drawn downward, something dogs just don't like. Lilly grudgingly accepted the gentle leader in exchange for being able to go on walks, but its clear that she doesn't care for it. Tough bounce, doggy. Deal with it.
During the first few days, it became quite apparent that Lilly had never experienced some basic things; namely stairs, swimming pools, and rain. My apartment is on the second floor of my complex, and the first time I tried to jog little Lilly up the flight of stairs, she slammed on all four brakes and skidded to a stop dead in her tracks. She looked at me as if to say, "I have no idea where those stairs go cowboy, and there's no damn way I'm going to find out." OK fair enough, it was pretty obvious that she had never seen stairs before, so I initially took the gentle route and tried to coax her up. "Come, Lilly. Come. Come. Come. Come. C'mon. Come. Lilly, COME. Let's GO. You can do it Lilly, lets GO. COME. COME." Etc., etc. I managed to get her halfway up, then she simply decided to become 35 pounds of dead weight and would go no further. I had no choice, I just snatched her up and carried her up the stairs. Once up to my apartment door she was fine, its just the stairs that were freaky. Same thing going down stairs. No amount of coaxing would get her to waddle her little self down the stairs to the bottom. After lots of encouragement, I just had to snatch her up again and carry her down.
Cesar Milan may be a controversial character in the dog training world, but I've definitely learned a few things from the Dog Whisperer. One of them is when you need a dog to cross a fear threshold, don't give them any time to think about it. Just lead them quickly into the goal and they will oftentimes run right past it. Worked like a charm with Lilly. After a few carry-ups and downs, I just ran her towards the stairs one day and she rocketed right up. Same thing going down the next time, and its been smooth sailing ever since. Whew! One milestone achieved.
Another thing Lilly had obviously never experienced before was rain. It started to rain pretty heavily at my apartment one night, and it was time for our evening walk. Lilly got halfway down the flight of stairs and jammed on the brakes again. She looked, sniffed, looked at me, and sat down. The message was clear; "I'm not going out there. What is all that noise and why is water falling from the sky?"
Thus, we were forced to regress to the carry-down routine again, but I promptly plunked her right into the rain shower and that was that.
Typical dog. A few looks around, some hearty sniffs into the air, and hey! Let's go! New smells! Sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff, all is well. Sure was fun watching her try to make sense of it all, though.
Lilly had obviously never seen a swimming pool either. Marilyn has a big one in her backyard, and Lilly is very careful about walking up to the edge, sniffing it, but never getting herself into a position where she could fall in. This dog is one of the more careful I've seen; she is wary (but not scared) of new things and approaches them cautiously.....but with marked curiosity. She's only fallen in once (when I accidentially bumped her in during a horse-around session), and that was just on the first step, yet it freaked her out pretty good. She has a healthy respect for the pool, which is good. When the weather warms up, she can expect to be thrown in and we'll see all the retriever-lab instincts kick in. After all, if I had webbed feet like this pup, I'd want to swim every single day.
Lilly likes to put things in her mouth. Everything. Absolutely everything. So far to this date (Dec. 28), here are the things we've had to extract from her little mug: Bark, leaves, orange peels, apple cores, poop of all kinds, sticks, cyprus berries, acorns, Q-tips, plastic wrap, numerous types of fabric, paper tags, fabric tags, chunks of plastic from dog toys, rocks, a disposable razor handle, pine needles, etc. etc. etc. Normally, this wouldn't be that much of a problem with a dog; whatever they manage to chew up and swallow, they just poop out. Not Lilly. Anything she swallows makes her cough, hack, and eventually throw up if the irritation is bad enough. Therefore, our hands spend an inordinate amount of time doing this,
Because she spends so much time doing this:
Sooo....My apartment complex is full of pigeons, or 'rock doves' for you bird geeks out there. Not a big deal for the dog, except that the local compliment of Red Tail and Red Shoulder hawks make a very convenient killing field out of my complex. They just lazily soar around above the rooftops, and then swoop down and pin a pigeon to the ground for lunch or din-din. Marilyn and I have both caught a red shouldered hawk ripping a pigeon apart outside my front door in broad daylight.
When we're on walks, this of course results in Lilly trying to consume whatever is left of the carcass and feather explosion left behind. I'll go ahead and attest at this time that extracting gritty pigeon body parts out of a puppy's mouth kinda sucks.
OK, so here we are after a week or so: we have a dog that we can generally control, but it eats everything when it should be the one dog that eats nothing. Glass half full, glass half full.....
Coming up in Part IV - SKUNK!
