Nothin like a new playpen to happy-up a wee one…Kenai 2 yrs
It’s done!! The boy has his-self a lovely, long, leg stretching spot to play! He’s been going out to play twice a day, and he’s in outdoorsman heaven. The AM romp is just me and Brown, mostly to get his fill of sniffing with a little stick chasing for seasoning. Afternoons, he gets his heavier running done with BB gallopoling about outside the “playpen”.
To give you some idea of how much more room he has, here’s a good pic that provide perspective.
We still have the die-in-the-rears with Kenai, and BB is still heaving though it’s not as frequent and uncontrolled overall. I’ve had BB on tylan again, the antibiotic most often used to treat bacterial overgrowths in the small intestine in dogs with pancreatic insufficiency. Typically you’ll see and improvement in a couple days. Beeb’s been on 4 days, and no better.
Last night BB threw up in his night-time bed, poor guy. We were all asleep so he was stuck with it until morning. He had a bath first thing in the morning, which means I got a bath shortly thereafter. I had crashed hard Thursday night so I’d be in good enough shape for a vet visit today. Sorry BB buds, I slept through it.
Kenai was fasted–I had Doc draw blood for a TLI to check for pancreatic inflammation. Their symptoms are distressingly identical to where we started 2 years ago, so we’re falling back onto the diagnostics that worked best the past couple years. Yeesh…Well suck it up, right?
In addition to the blood draw, Kenai was given a big load of B-12. Hopefully that plus the extra exercise will stimulate his appetite. I can get about 1 meal a day in him, which means he’s only getting 1/3 the amount of food a dog his size needs.
I’m looking into a different brand of raw dog food, since neither of the boys will eat the Nature’s Variety now. I wouldn’t be half surprised if this inflammatory stuff came on because they were “off their feed” for so long. It was the pre-packaged raw that got them off those pancreatic enzymes, after all.
Given what we know about dogs, as listed by Horowitz: The world, to them, is:
Incredibly smelly — imagine that a simple flower contains a history of the insects that have visited it, the people who picked it, the petal that is dying versus the petal that is just about to reach its peak.
Full of our Knees (go down to your dog’s height and look at the world from there.. boy is it different),
Running at a Different Rate — I love this concept of hers, that scents come and go at different rates than visual signals, disappearing, moving around, full of information about the past in a sensory world that make look the same to us but is constantly changing to a dog. She also reminded us that dogs see at a faster “flicker-fusion” rate than humans, such that their brains divide visual signals into smaller units than do ours. Could it be that they then are quicker to see movements when they begin than we? We do know that they are better at seeing movement than we are…
Full of Details — that may be irrelevant to us, like the scent on the carpet, the slime trail of slugs on a blade of grass.
Evaluated based on how a dog can relate to it: Can it fit in my mouth? Do I chew it or chase it? Just as we see a pencil and a mitten as 2 completely different things, dogs may categorize them as the same; as things that can be picked up and put in the mouth, (or slept on, or rolled in, etc etc). –Alexandra Horowitz
I know, I know, I’m such a doggie-brain egghead…but I enjoy the jolt of seeing Kenai’s world through his perspective instead of my own. So many unexpected little things that make the two of us live almost literally in different worlds while in the same environment.
The doggie brain egghead stuff started because Kenai made no sense at all to me when his personality did such a major 180. I found myself with a need to figure out his “what, when, where, and most importantly why”. I did have to live with him and there wasn’t a great deal of harmony goin’ on if ya know what I mean.
Kenai was never one to give up his own view of things to see it my way, so it was up to me to switch into his world. But it got so weird–it’s like there was an impenetrable wall between me and him. I didn’t “get” him and he didn’t necessarily care to “get” me.
“Why did he do that” became a worn out from use phrase in my head! I was hoping to figure out how to understand him as well as develop strategies to inhibit the few behaviors I really didn’t want. Can’t say as I “understand” Kenai all that much better (sigh), and certain haven’t found a way to stop the crazy critter stuff at home.
Still, that highlighted sentence made a peice of the Kenai puzzle click into place: the field may look the same to me after twenty minutes in the same place, but it isn’t to the furball at the end of the leash. I recognized he was detecting who’d touched this or walked over there, but the idea that those smells would move around hadn’t occured to me.
Being a smoker (I know..) I’d seen how the smoke stayed in a certain strata of the air in the room if left uncirculated (about shoulder height for me). It makes sense then that if scent chemicals did the same thing, the smallest little breeze would totally change the way Kenai percieved the environment.
Every step we take in the field creates a different mix of scents for him, and come to think of it, how exciting and interesting that would be (as opposed to boring ol’ me)! Maybe a bit overwhelming, too, after the tick diseases started to affect his brain.
Did the toxins crossing the blood/brain barrier scramble how his brain worked? Or maybe making him hypersensitive to all the scent-changes? I know my Lyme disease and resulting auto-immune syndromes has noticably affected my brain. Especially how much stimuli I can handle before feeling overrun and anxious, not to mention my ability to make connections and associations.
Has it done the same to Kenai? Was say, obedience class back at 6-7 mo more like being dropped in a mad wild circus and told to pay attention anyway? Something as simple to us as “heeling” could be an amazing whirlwind of changing smells, plus all the movement Kenai’s so very sensitive too.
And geez, how much would really thinking about the implications of doggie-perception alter what I expect from Kenai in various situations? Or might I socialize a puppy differently next time, paying more attention to scents and tactile stimulus than the resulting reactions? There’s a myriad of things between me and Kenai that might change?
Hopefully I won’t “lose” this thought-thread in the fibro fog, ’cause there’s some serious tonnage of facets to examine in that thar’ topic…
***
Well, my own personal tonnage is still on the hips etc, though it is coming off. Not at any great galloping rate, mind you–more like it’s fighting for it’s life. “Off off darn fat”! And the room change over from sewing room to Kenai’s new bedroom is almost complete. Now there is furniture to move. Ouch, just thinkin ’bout it.
A new bedroom, a new playpen, maybe soon a new food…let’s hope things are looking up from the little boy perspective!
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Posted by greatdaneservicedog on October 29, 2010
http://greatdaneservicedog.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/big-outside-boy-by-lisa-harmon/
