venting about dog owners in my neighborhood

I’m constantly frustrated with the other dog owners in my neighborhood.  literally, almost constantly.

I found out from steve at my last training session that my block in gloucester city is notorious for bad, loose dogs.  steve suggested I either get a tread mill or a long walking stick for the summertime because he gets so many calls about stray or loose dogs that he’s down on my block at least once a week!

I came across a loose dog a few weeks ago.  he was huge… looked like a mastiff mix.  and he ran out into the middle of the sidewalk in front of wally and me one day when we were out on a walk.  thank god for my dog whisperer obsession, for many reasons, but this time because cesar taught me how to deal with an unfamiliar dog.  I immediately put wally behind me, and turned sideways from the dog.  I didn’t turn my back to him, but just turned sideways and didn’t make eye contact so that he knew I wasn’t trying to threaten him, but I also wasn’t going to back away.  after he barked at me a few times, he ran off into what I learned was his back yard.  wally and I finished our walk uneventfully.

a couple of weeks ago, joe told me he heard that dog got out again.  this time, though, he attacked a guy and his little chihuahua.  we found out last week that the chihuahua ended up dying from the attack.  since then, I haven’t walked down that way for fear of him getting out and decided that he gave us a free pass last time.  I haven’t gotten a walking stick yet, but I have invested in pepper spray just in case I do end up coming across a dog that doesn’t decide we’re too much trouble to take a piece out of.

this is just one isolated incident, though.  I have neighbors all along my street who have dogs and never put them on leashes.  most of the dogs are harmless, but with wally’s dog aggression it’s just not safe to have other dogs coming up to him without a leash to pull them away on.  nothing is more annoying than an owner shouting from 20 yards away, “oh, he won’t bite you!”  well, that’s good to know, but what if my dog decides to bite?!  jeez, it’s so frustrating!

I hardly ever see anyone out actually walking their dogs on leashes, most of the time I see dogs in their yards.  they bark incessantly and aggressively as we walk by and all I can think is how sorry I feel for those dogs.  they don’t get enough exercise or mental stimulation, which is why they go absolutely ape shit when they see people walk by.  it’s the only outlet they have!  so I try not to take it personally when dogs bark at us like that, but it still makes me sad.

it figures that I moved onto the most notorious bad dog block known to camden county animal control… that just seems to be the way my luck is sometimes.

wally’s dog aggression

I haven’t really had any other dogs around wally.  I noticed that he growled and snapped at my neighbor’s dogs, a pitbull and a Rhodesian ridgeback, who are never on leashes and never listen to their owner when he gives them commands.  they would swarm him and get in his face, and he would snap.  I thought this was relatively normal.  these dogs had no doggie manners!  they went straight for him, right in his face.  that’s pretty damn rude in the doggie world – it’s pretty much a sign that you’re looking for a fight.
then, I asked gina’s mom to come over and help me learn some techniques for training wally.  she brought her german shepherd, willow, over with her.  again, I thought he snapped at her because she did the same thing as the other dogs – she went right into his face. 

however.  I was out walking with mr. bear one afternoon and a guy was also out with his dog (I love how now that it’s nicer out I see all these people out, but when it was the dead of winter there was NO ONE out!).  they were walking on the sidewalk coming towards us.  we owners did the right thing, we moved to the middle of the sidewalk with the dogs on the outside.  well, even unprovoked wally went after this other dog.  that was when I realized I had a dog who had dog aggression.

I had one session with steve where the first thing we did was take a nice walk with another dog.  this makes the dogs feel as though they’re migrating in a pack, so it usually lessens any aggression.  sure enough, once we walked for about 15 minutes and THEN let the dogs smell each other, wally was fine.  he wasn’t “happy” with the other dog by any means, but he could at least sniff the other dog and be sniffed by the other dog without incident. 

the only problem I face with trying to rehabilitate wally with this particular problem is that I don’t know anyone with a really well-behaved dog who lives nearby that I can really practice with.  :(

spectacular, spectacular prom

 wally looking stellar in his tux

my best friend bear had a seizure last tuesday.

wally needed a haircut, so I decided to take him to a groomer that a neighbor recommended to me, a plus grooming in gloucester city.  I cannot say this enough… DO NOT GO HERE.  ever!  when I got him back, one of his nails was cut so short that it was bleeding, and they shaved him so short and carelessly on his belly that they nicked his little warts and his belly was covered in blood!  the entire ride home, he was licking, licking, licking himself all over.  I don't know if this was from stress, or from the shampoo they used drying his skin out since he kept licking for a few days.

as I had him lying on his back so I could try and clean the blood off his belly, all his legs started shaking.  then he started drooling a lot and was doing a little of the running in place thing, all the while still shaking.  joe and I were just holding him up so he wouldn’t fall or hurt himself, and when the shaking started getting less, joe called the vet while I stayed with wally.  the entire episode was probably about a minute, give or take a few seconds.

the vet said it was probably stress-induced, but I should still check with the groomer just in case he could have gotten into something while he was there.  the woman I talked to on the phone acted like I was the lawyer cross-examining her in a murder trial.  I explained to her what happened and asked a couple of questions, and she just kept saying, “that happens sometimes, it’s not our fault!”  god!  I kept saying that I just wanted to give the vet an accurate description of what happened when we took him in… the way she was acting completely made me disregard anything she may have told me.

once we got him to the blackwood animal hospital, his overall exam went very well.  the doctor said his heart sounded good, his reflexes were excellent, his pulse was steady… then explained that about 90% of the dogs he sees with epilepsy are little white dogs with curly hair.  three strikes on my buddy bear!  since he didn’t have a grand mal seizure (no loss of control of his bladder or bowels, no eye-rolling, no yelping, etc.), the doctor suggested we simply keep an eye on him for now.  if wally gets them more frequently or if they become more intense, we can think about putting him on phenobarbital, but the vet said that for now the side-effects of the medication would probably outweigh the benefit if he doesn’t have seizures often. he also assured me many times that wally is not in pain or scared when he's having the seizure, he just needs someone to help him not accidentally hurt himself since he won't be able to stand on his own during it.

so that’s what we’re doing – just keeping an eye on him and trying to keep him out of situations that are very stressful.  I will never, EVER go back to that horrible groomer.  yes, they were about $20 cheaper but I’d rather pay the extra $20 at petsmart and get a dog back that isn’t covered in blood and so shaken up that he has a seizure!

this past weekend

mr. bear's head shot

lazy saturday morning

freshly shorn!

he looks so skinny with his hair short!

training - go to bed

this command is really a mixed bag for me and wally.  he’s really, really good at going to bed when I give him the command… it probably helps that he loves his bed so much!  so he’s good at going to bed, and he’s good at staying there even when I try to distract him with food and toys.  however, getting him to stay in his bed when someone knocks on the door… whew!

he just gets so amped up whenever there’s a knock on the door!  and I can’t trick him with training by knocking on the door myself while he’s in the bed… he figured out pretty quickly that I was knocking.  so I’ve worked with him on it as much as I can, and he’s getting better… but of course, he is my little work in progress!

I can gladly report, though, that throughout the training I haven’t gotten any growls out of him, even when I have to push him into a down kinda hard.  I feel pretty confident that he’s starting to really trust joe and me, which is a great feeling!

training - sit-stay, down-stay

as I said before, wally was pretty solid with sit when we first brought him home.  he wasn’t so good at stay, though, and we certainly weren’t trying down very hard with him since he bit gina’s mom when she tried showing us.  I explained to steve that wally wasn’t very receptive to being pushed or pulled, but steve showed us a way to get wally to sit by applying pressure to pressure points right above his hips and how to get him to go down just by pushing him over from a sit.  

part of what steve taught is that whenever joe or I give the sit or down command, the “stay” command should just be expected.  so when wally goes into a sit or a down, he has to just stay there til we give him the break command.  so wally’s got sit-stay down pat.  now, the down-stay… that’s a slightly different story.

wally knows what the command means.  he’s demonstrated it time and again when steve is actually in the house with us.  however, when it’s just the two of us, he hardly ever goes down on the first command.  one of my big mistakes was repeating the command a couple of times before enforcing the command (giving him a push into the down).  if he knows you’re going to give him a couple of free passes before enforcing it, he’s going to take advantage of it.  it’s taking me some practice, but I’m getting better at simply saying the command once.  most of the time he doesn’t immediately go down, but I’ve gotten to the point where he just sees me start to bend down to him and he goes down on his own.  not perfection… but it’s a start!  once he’s in the down, though, he’s really great at staying there until we release him.  it’s that initial obedience that he has a little trouble with.  again, I’m sure that his home before us never enforced rules or obedience in any way, so in a way, it’s rehabilitation and not necessarily teaching him a new trick.  the act of going into his down is more of a psychological exercise than it is anything else.