Perrito the Toughest Tiny Terrier

Perrito has been one of my foster dogs for over six months now. I will say upfront that he is a challenging dog. And I will also say that this tiny guy has the biggest, toughest spirit I’ve been privileged to know in a long time. He is eight pounds of muscle and resilience.

Perry has chronic pancreatitis that is being managed through diet, supplements, and as much predictability as I can provide so as not to rock his world. Because Perry also has anxiety and some serious compulsion issues. Over the last six months, he's worked hard and I've learned to work smarter on behavior interventions, and it's become clear that he needs additional help in the form of pharmaceutical support. Part of his visit to the vet today was about that support.

Currently, Perry is terrified of restraint, grooming, and exams. We've come a long way with body handling and I can touch and massage him just about anywhere and pick him up if he's in the mood. Anything else requires a muzzle and nail trimming is right out. For our vet visit, he had to wear a basket muzzle before we'd quite finished with muzzle conditioning to make it a "fun tool" that predicts lots and lots of meat bits. It was not fun.

The little guy had a rough night of no sleep in a different place, wasn't feeling well, had to travel without an anxiety-soothing bone, had to wear a muzzle, got poked and prodded, and was pretty scared in general. After all I put him through, he leaned against me and asked for pets. And then when we got home, the poor guy fell out of the truck. He got up, shook himself off, and went to check out any changes in yard scents. As you can see from the photo, Perry is exhausted. And he'll be the first one up and trotting outside as soon as I move toward the back door.

Perry gets himself into trouble sometimes by barking in the faces of terriers who don't put up with such stuff. They roar at him and he retreats, but it doesn't get him down for long. He has clocked himself in the head with his own heavy rubber toys, knocking himself to the ground. He gets right up and charges the toy again. He has been severely ill with vomiting and diarrhea. It didn’t keep him from hauling his short self up onto the nearest chair for some desk explorations. 

Perrito says, "You can't keep a good dog down!"

Goat Milk Good!

One of my goals for Belle is repeated experiences feeling safe around anything new. Since she began at the extreme of having a phobia of anything new, encouraging her to engage her seeking system and her curiosity continues to be an incremental process of teensy, tiny steps. Of course I have used her meals as one avenue of introduction. I'm sure not going to pass up something that easy!

Belle and eating go together like classic rock and air guitar. Food is this girl's number one passion. She has a breakfast dance, a dinner dance with adorably goofy grunts, and a "Hey, treats would be so amazingly fabulous right now!" bouncy dance that works on me every time. However, she has also been extremely picky and intolerant of even small changes. Has. Past tense. Belle hasn't refused a meal in quite a while.

In the beginning, I only added a few drops of a new food at a time and then it was about a teaspoon left in the bowl for her to choose to taste. Or not. Sometimes it was just an added scent. The day she tried ground venison for the first time was a day I had to hold back a laugh. She licked it in my hand, jumped back in surprise, circled round, and dove back to my hand for more. I swear her eyes bugged out. "Whoa! What was THAT deliciousness?" It happened again when I offered the warm liquid just poured off of cooked beef. As I fed her by hand, food dripped on the floor, all over me, and on her, but the mess was totally worth it. She was a full, happy girl as her whiskers glistened with beef fat in the evening sun.

Usually, a new taste sensation goes more like this. About a teaspoon of the new food item is off to the side of her regular food in her bowl. After handing her a few dollops of regular food, I grab the next dollop and brush it across the new food. She sniffs, retreats, whirls around in a couple of circles, and considers whether she'd like to continue eating. It is eating, after all. With food. Ah, food! She returns and scoops up what's in my hand. She eats the new food and the old food with perhaps a pause or two, depending on her gustatory evaluation of the new food.

Belle found cooked pumpkin sneeze-worthy, but then decided it was not that bad. She was clearly horrified by her first taste of canned salmon, so I didn't hand her a second taste. She did clean it out of her bowl, however, and has eaten salmon since then. She even eats a bit of granulated seaweed as a regular part of her breakfast now.

Her discovery of fresh goat milk was practically a blissful experience. I dredged the dollop of food in the goat milk and offered it in my palm. She stayed near my hand to take in the scent. She let it roll around in her connoisseur nose and light up her brain before snapping up the goat-coated goodness and giving a little foreleg bounce before diving in again. "Mm, tangy!" 

Belle gets a little goat milk with her meals often now, since she likes to hover near the bowl, which also happens to mean hovering over my lap. She is still nervous about even a silenced, no-flash camera phone, but she let me take the above photo for goat milk. Goat milk good. 

Morning, Belle

Finally, a spy photo of BlueBelle on the bed that isn't so much like a grainy spy photo. This sound-muted, no-flash, sneaky phone photo shows one of Belle's visits to the rest of us -- dogs and human -- as we are all waking up.

For months, I baited my bed with treats and soft chew bones for her to find during the periods that she roams most of the house alone. Soon, she began sleeping on the bed while I was home. A few months ago, she was so excited that we were awake for the day that she suddenly leaped onto the bed. I froze. The dogs froze. Belle froze. My movements were slow as cold molasses as I gingerly inched out of bed and Belle jumped down to join us on the way to the backyard.

Eventually, she made it part of her routine to jump onto the bed and greet the dogs in the morning. She began walking within inches of me to sniff anything new like a book or the phone in a different place. She would settle in and take a nap with us if we all got quiet again. I rolled out of bed increasingly later. Yawn.

Occasionally, Belle stays on the bed with us all night. If she is on the bed when the rest of us head to bed, I turn my back to her and glide discreetly past her into the room. If I am suitably careful, she will stay. She is adamant about keeping her space bubble free of dogs, so the dogs move carefully, as well.

Morning blooms with a brighter Belle mood. She stretches long, wags her blue-grey nub of a tail, greets her favorite dogs, and responds to my praise by moving toward me. She is tolerant of my moving around and of having dogs play around her some. Belle's large, sparkling eyes and curious face are lovely sights first thing in the morning.

Guess who got her last nails trimmed today?

Belle, a bit tense about the camera, is on the left

That would be brave Miss Belle. I am so proud of this girl! A few months ago, nail trimming for semi-feral BlueBelle was a big deal, with ongoing discussions and planning between her vet behaviorist team, my (sainted) vet, and me. It was to be combined with another exam and involve sedation at the car and on and on. It was a good plan, but I secretly wanted to see what I could do by applying my skill set alone. So I dropped the subject with the vets and started to work.

It was slow going and I did not have the option to whip out the standard (and faster) clicker counter-conditioning from my tool box. But I did have time, patience, and food. God bless that little Belle, she does love food! Without boring you with all the tiny steps, I'll just say that there were a LOT -- hundreds -- of teensy, tiny steps toward helping her feel secure enough to adjust her emotional responses from fearful to tolerant to even positively accepting in some cases.

I confess that I don't have dozens of pages of meticulously charted, preplanned behavior modification records to show. I wish I were that kind of trainer, but I'm not. I didn't show my work in Trigonometry, either. While preplanning is necessary when working with a fearful (any) dog and a variety of proven methods must be ready for use, when it comes to the actual dance with the dog, flow and intuition take over. When I count seconds and analyze every muscle contraction, I lose her. When I feel into her as a beautiful being in need of safety, she will dance with me.

Obviously, we've been working on touch. First, I had to be able to get close enough to her. Most of the time she got treats for choosing to come to me or letting me sit next to her briefly. Other times the reward was me moving away from her. The goal is to push only a fraction each time, or sometimes not at all and leave her wanting more. The first day that she felt fingers rubbing her ear and leaned into them was a good day indeed. I quit while touch was still desired so she allowed me to briefly touch her at other times, too.

Working up to holding Belle was too much of a leap. I would do that a great deal more gradually next time. She is not at all comfortable with the hold. She tolerates it, but she's still scared. It jeopardizes our relationship and I don't want that. So we have many, many more tiny steps to go for more touch and a comfortable hold (if that is ever possible).

The nail trimming was not actually that scary. Belle was focused on treats each time and we'd negotiated the aforementioned hold that needs more work. Getting a nail trimmed also meant getting to freely leap around the living room, receiving handfuls of treats while the whole doggy family enjoyed a food party. This was promptly followed by a ground venison dinner for Miss Belle. She decided that the food part was a pretty sweet deal and worth anticipating.  

BlueBelle just asked to go outside!

Three cheers for Belle's milestone moment! She just came to the door of my home office, looked around the corner at me, and whined. I asked, "Outside?" and she whimpered, looking in the direction of the back door. When I opened the door, she walked right out and peed. A celebratory shower of treats followed her return, as she bunny-hopped around the living room at the sight of the treat bag. Miss Belle rocks!

Why am I over the moon regarding a simple action that other dogs perform multiple times per day? It's not the house training. Remarkably, Belle has been house trained for months now, thanks to routine, the example set by the other dogs, routine, teaching her the "outside" cue, and routine. Treats were actually not involved, but that's another post. Cautious herding was involved early on, but that's yet another post. Belle's house training is so reliable that she is trustworthy loose in the house alone and now even during rainy days. (I think I just heard a gasp of disbelief from fellow Rat Terrier butlers.)

What is causing my elation is that semi-feral Belle has just accorded the human in the house another measure of relevance. Woo hoo, I'm finally relevant. Sort of. A little bit more. She's still too scared to come close in most situations. But in more and more tiny ways, Belle is perceiving this human as useful. We are ever so carefully building a relationship.

"Some changes are cool," says BlueBelle

Belle has a veterinary behaviorist on her team, along with the rest of us at New Rattitude. UGA's Dr. Crowell-Davis and her staff have been an essential part of helping Belle adjust to the world of humans from her semi-feral starting point. The last few months have included highs of bouncy doggie happiness and lows of health and emotional challenges. She spent some time on a complicated pharmaceutical cocktail from both of her vets, but is now down to very low doses of antianxiety meds and a few supplements. Belle is currently fairly stable and doing well.

One of Belle's challenges is neophobia. She's frightened, and sometimes terrified, of anything new. Once she gets used to me wearing a certain type of shoe or pants, she will run away if I switch to clothing she hasn't seen before. Once she gets used to a routine, if one of the steps changes she will begin to pace anxiously or run away. She was afraid of even small additions or object placement shifts in her environment, but she has learned to adjust to those small changes. This is probably thanks to a low dose of fluoxetine and plenty of practice being safe in an environment that rarely changes fundamentally. Her foster mom values tranquility so Belle can take advantage of quiet time and space to acclimate to changes that are usually incremental. We're creating a history of emotional security that is also helping her to recover when changes are more abrupt.

Belle has discovered that at least one new thing can be beyond fabulous -- meat! She had a preference for poor quality puppy mill rations and it has taken months to entice her to accept better and better foods. While I track down the source of her possible allergies, she needs to be on the best food with the fewest ingredients, which, in my opinion, is raw food. I would put tiny pieces of raw meat in her bowl and leave it for her to try after feeding her kibble and canned food. Huh uh. No way. She wouldn't go near it. Enter corticosteroid treatment for her severe itching. Little Belle was so hungry from the prednisone that she ate whatever was left in her bowl, and then anything I hand fed her at mealtime, and then she started hanging around for more. She's off those drugs and still loving her new foods. Her dental misalignment prevents her from eating even the softest raw meaty bones, but she has given it a good smacking try. She enjoys scooping up ground raw foods from my hand and prompting me to hurry up with the next yummy mouthful. Fabulous!

Belle has decided that she quite likes central heat and warm comforters fresh from the dryer. This living in a house stuff is not half bad, even if it does involve humans. It is the human who serves her ground quail, after all. 

BlueBelle Studies the Signals

Belle has been living with me for almost eight weeks and is getting a little more comfortable, comparatively. It helps that she has enough experience in her current environment that she can often predict what will happen next. She knows that if the human announces "It's gonna be loud" from the kitchen, a coffee bean grinder will make all kinds of racket for a bit, but nothing will happen in her area in the living room. She can stay right where she is with some sense of safety.

She knows that the beep-beep of the house alarm being set late at night means that she should get up from her resting place and be ready to go down the hall. She waits for the human to call "go to bed" and then lopes down the hall to the back bedroom. When the dogs and I are settled into the big bed, she settles into her dog bed for the night, knowing that, according to her experience so far, no one will encroach upon her space.

As one might expect, she has learned a suite of predictive cues related to meal times and her anticipation begins growing earlier in the process. The evening meal time is less predictable than the morning meal time, but Belle knows the very beginning of the process. As soon as Foodnutty Dog #1 is told to "kennel up," Belle's ears perk and her eyes turn toward the kitchen, where the amazing food action will soon take place. As Foodnutty Dog #2 will attest, my food preparation pace is glacial and I occasionally get sidetracked by text messaging. As if food weren't exciting enough, this bit of uncertainty increases the anticipation. And this is when Belle dances her bunny hop.

Video will be captured as soon as Belle allows it, but I will try to do it justice. She bounces on her back legs with her body slightly forward in the air and her front legs tucked close to her body. Side to side she bounces on two legs, her mouth cutely framed by her jutting lower canines. Around the coffee table she bounces mostly on four legs. She bows and bounces and the tiny stub tail wags. Sometimes she lets out the softest grunts of excitement as she rears and bounces. Not much is more thrilling to me than watching a dog who experiences so much fear have so much fun.

When it's finally her turn to eat, I stand in the middle of the living room while she bounces around me and then I sing "Be-elle." She gets into her start line crouch. I say, "Let's eat!" and she races around the coffee table once before loping down the hall to the back bedroom where she'll be hand fed. She peers around the bedroom door to make sure I'm on my way.

Belle is now accepting handfuls of food with my body in a sitting position facing her and my wrist resting on my knee. Her underbite acts like a shovel that will knock some wet kibble onto the floor. She's comfortable now reaching for the kibble on the floor underneath my hand and is even okay with her ear brushing my hand. I still avoid direct eye contact.

Belle has learned far more environmental cues than I could even guess. Hundreds, no doubt. I’m sure she's learned more about my body language than I have hers. It's important that she have some sense of control over her environment and her own body so she can feel safer. Compared to her extreme hyper-vigilance when she was new to the environment, she has at least calmed enough that she must feel safer.

New Girl: BlueBelle

BlueBelle spent the first few years of her life as a breeding dog in a puppy mill. She was taken in by a kind New Rattitude foster home and was helped to heal physically and begin to learn what it's like to live in a home. She came to my home about four weeks ago.

Miss Belle is currently semi-feral, but is developing at her own pace with a little help. She spent the first week exhausting herself with panicked flights. I slowed down every household routine, stayed far away from her, and did not look her in the face. I did have to herd her from the yard into the house in the beginning. It is true that I could have cornered her and restrained her as she shut down and I could have penned her in a small area as I've been advised by several trainers. For this specific dog and for my specific personal aversions, I instead gave Belle the most and the safest choices I could give her. That is working for us.

At first, I fed her outside while the rest of the dogs ate inside. When the back door closes with me inside, Belle knows she can count on a respite from humans. I would talk to her without looking at her as I set her bowl down, and then I'd go inside. If she skittered away before eating all of the food, I would go outside and drop something new and yummy in the bowl while talking to her, and then return to the house. I transitioned her feeding place to my bedroom and by the end of the first week, she had learned the meal time routine and had associated my presence during this time with yummy food.

At the start of the second week, she was anxious but not panicked as I followed her into my bedroom with her bowl. I lay quietly on my back on the floor and stretched my right arm out behind my head with a handful of her favorite Wellness Core kibble mixed with 95% meat canned food. For twenty minutes, Belle didn't move from her crouch in the corner behind me. I got up and took the bowl out of the room with me. A few seconds later, I returned and resumed my position. Ten minutes later, I suppressed a happy giggle as I felt the first brush of whiskers on my hand. She slowly ate her dinner, one carefully extended handful at a time.

It is almost three weeks since I began the hand feeding and we have progressed, as of this morning, to her taking food from my hand while I am sitting on the floor. Each tiny change that's made has to be made one at a time and she needs enough repetitions of the "new look" to be satisfied that nothing bad will happen to her. This sitting change is very big. So the hand is still on the floor, it's still behind me (good for the upper abs), and I'm absolutely not looking at her right now.

Beautiful Belle continues to make progress in adjusting to life in a home with a human. I will post updates on her progress as I can.

Meet Arni

Arni is not a new guy as he's been with New Rattitude for quite a while. Mr. Arni is a unique little dude with a sad history. He has a lot of fears and is generally anxious, but he has learned over time that it's okay to relax a bit here and there. He's a really short Teddy Roosevelt Terrier and barely eleven pounds -- a tiny guy in a big world that's often scary to him. It's easy to feel compassion for a frightened little dog, but what makes Arni challenging is that his way of dealing with his fear is to go on the offense.

Arni has clearly had his growl "punished out of him" by others. This means that now humans don't get the welcome warning of a growl when he's scared and needs for us to back off. He goes straight to the bite in his own defense because he's learned that's the only thing that will successfully give him needed space. This means that when we go out, I must vigilantly maintain his safety bubble so that no one risks getting bitten. No matter how much strangers want to pet the cute little dog, he'd rather they didn't. This also means that I must pay very close attention to all of his subtle body language so that I don't get bitten when he perceives a threat. So many things in the world are threatening to Arni: a look, a gesture, a tone of voice, a movement, proximity of dogs or humans, certain noises. We humans would understand this better and faster if he trembled behind a chair, but Arni plays too-tough instead, rushing and tackling scary things to make them go away. 

Arni and I have done a lot of work together and we've come a long way. We still have a long way to go. Someone interested in Arni as a canine companion would be someone willing to continue this work. Someone smarter than I who can take a lesson from my hardheadedness and do this work with no expectations. Someone who understands that a scared little guy whose brain didn't get a chance to develop normally will need a light touch, an open heart, and the freedom to make his own choices.

I'm a dog trainer and "rescue rehabber" of a number of years. I used to think that all behavior could be molded to conform to human desire with a logical plan, with enough hard work. Arni has humbled the hell out of me. What I think now is that Arni is just Arni. He doesn't need to be fixed. He needs to be helped to feel more comfortable. He isn't going to be "normal." He's just going to be Arni, an impossibly cute, weird, funny, at times happy, sweetly affectionate, morning guy who needs to be allowed to be himself. 

I realize that Arni's true nature is appealing to about .0001% of potential adopters. That's okay. He and I are the stutter-stepper team (two steps forward, one step back) and we'll keep at it while he grows into a wider comfort zone. One day his new people will find him and decide that the real Arni is the one for them.

Geni Meets Spike

Geni's first meeting with the cat of the house went very well. She was highly curious, but not overly excited. Spike is dog-savvy and can handle herself with one dog at a time. According to Spike, Geni needs to be a bit more calm before they can interact face-to-face, but she gets a paws-up for a fairly controlled first meeting. I called Geni away many times to be paid treats for attention. She was able to focus on me, even when Spike was in motion.

Spike is a brat and likes to get in a good session of dog-teasing whenever possible. So foster mom is tasked with looking out for both cat and dog when Spike gets cocky. Which I expect will take place at the second meeting.