Today the doggy had his first taste of doggy Prozac, and from my limited interaction with him this morning it seems like it might be working. That, or he is just really tired. After being put into his kennel, instead of barking for four hours straight he would only bark a few times and then lie down. Maybe this will finally calm him down enough to actually survive the day without going batshit crazy.
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Nothing like having a drugged up dog for a pet, just so it’s under control. 😦
The idea is to have him sleep during the day and wake up to discover us home and everything is still OK. He needs to understand that we are going to leave every day, but we are still going to come back again. We think he’s angry that he is going to get abandoned again. And he needs something like that. He was a lot better today on the pills, but he still managed to turn his favorite blanket into fluff.
But don’t worry. My mom would send the dog to a farm before she kept him drugged up for life. The crate hasn’t been working, so this is plan B.
Well it will never change. I know I am sounding so judgemental about this. But he views that crate as a punsihment, forget the seperation anxiety. As long as he hates the crate, it will never work for him. Thus he will tear up blankets and anything in his reach there to express how pissed off he is that he’s in there.
Seperation anxiety is huge if not caught early. Working for a Vet for so many years, I saw it first hand. Leave a radio on in the room you are keeping him locked up in. It might calm him down.
I would recommend that you check the Dog Whisperer’s site or have you mom do it.
Also, I think you know that you guys shouldn’t have a dog, if you can’t be with it in the first place. Why would your mom get a dog that has to be crated all the time? See, I am lucky because I only teach a few hours a few days per week. Rutlie is only in his crate then, and he loves his crate. He goes int here on his own. I leave music on for him, too. He sleeps with us, so he’s only in there when we aren’t home to prohibit him from getting into trouble. He is a dog after all, not a person, so trust can’t exist there. Better to not have to punish him for something, so we crate trained him.
I seriously would tell your mom to look on the Dog Whisperer’s site. She can email him questions too. I really think, though, that the dog is better off at the pound. You all need a cat. 🙂
And I am sorry if this came off so judgemental. I just know so much about these things now, and my LJ friends, Becky and Timothy, are dog rescue people for cases like this. They take the unruley dog and train it, through their dog whispering ways, and then find it a home. They talk about this almost exact situation every other day.
My mom has been on the Dog Whisperer’s site, has about a billion printouts, has talked to numerous vets and animal professionals, and is trying everything she can to make this dog calm down. Don’t take my indifference towards him to mean that she isn’t trying everything she can. We didn’t want to crate him. We also didn’t want him destroying the house. Hey, if it were up to me, he’d be out of here. It’s not up to me. He’s not my dog.
This isn’t like we don’t know how to deal with dogs. We already have two German Shepherds that are great. I just think my mom jumped on the whole available Australian Shepherd thing without doing her research on them first.