Basket of dog & puppy toys from Kong
I am done!! All my foster dogs are out to their new families!! Hooray!
I can’t describe the level of contentment that swept over me after last Friday when all the puppies and Willow moved to their new homes. The past week has been a breeze with just my dogs and Chloe. Unfortunately, Chloe still hasn’t found her forever home but she has fully recovered from her last experience. She is back to her sweet, very smart self. Today she left for her permanent foster home. I’ll still see her at The Water Bowl when I work there. I’m 
planning on doing some training with her and working with her shyness around some men. It will be good to have contact with her. And it is VERY good to have her out of my house.
Tonight we received a box full of samples from Kong. We tried some of their toys I’ve never used before! I’ve talked about how much I love their products before but now I can describe how my dogs liked them:
We took a large bone and filled the ends with treats and Kong Stuff’n and gave it to Lollie. She immediately became VERY possessive of it and is still chewing it. We had to put her upstairs so 
the other dogs could enjoy their treats. If you have a dog who is at all dog aggressive or toy possessive, this treat will set them off…it is that good.
Hermes got the regular sized Kong bone, also filled with treats and stuffing. He is still working on his. He has also confiscated Bella‘s stuffed large sized puppy Kong and is currently chewing on that one while his lies nearby. Unfortunately, Bella preferred the cattle bones we have lying around, but hey, two out of three ain’t bad.
Lollie guards her kong
Weary dog fosterers
The work load is almost unbearable now…I am letting everything go. Luckily, ever since Chloe‘s been back my son is interested in playing in the puppy pen again! I don’t know why but he has always liked her, and I suspect that she keeps Willow busy and out of his hair…
The puppies have figured out (with Willow and Chloe’s help) how to get into the other half of the side yard. This morning I was washing dishes and saw a puppy up on the second floor deck!! I hustled her down the stairs, which she handled well to my surprise, and found three more waiting. When they saw me they all started coming up! It was funny. I corralled everyone and as soon as I bent down to take some pictures the whole group promptly fell asleep. So, not the greatest pictures but a funny sight for me.
I have had my heart, head, and will-power all set for being DONE with all fostering duties on August 7th when the puppies leave. Alas, it seems that isn’t going to be the case (due to Willow and Chloe still being with us) and it is making me stressed. I am aware of that old tendency I have of projecting into the future and then feeling really overwhelmed by what I see there. I am trying to just trust and be with this moment. I know I am feeling overwhelmed, and tired of fostering. As much as I love it I need a break. A L-O-N-G break. I worry about Willow finding a good home but mostly I worry about Chloe. Won’t someone out there give her the chance she needs??! Sigh. I need a miracle.
I have never had an adult female dog in my home as a foster because of our Lollie who is dog-aggressive. Now I have our Quaker parrot, Frank Frank. I have to always ask myself: where’s Lollie, where’s Chloe, where’s Willow, and is anyone near the bird? Thank god we’ve had nice weather as I can put everyone outside and get a moment of peace. I have access to a wonderful doggy daycare, soon to be reopened as The Water Bowl and I need to take advantage of their willingness to have my foster mamas there, free of charge. Tomorrow I plan to drop the two mamas off in the morning and hopefully not see them again until I go into work there in the evening.
I know this will end…right?
Kennel Cough
I was at the vet (again) with another one of my dogs who has caught Williow‘s kennel cough. Now, I am embarrassed to admit this but I have not had my dogs vaccinated for kennel cough. I feel stupid now but had my dogs not gotten it (like they haven’t for the last few times mamas with kennel cough have lived with us) I would be feeling validated. I guess I always knew I was taking a risk but it seemed worth it to avoid over vaccinating them. Anyway, I have changed my mind. I will now vaccinate Hermes and Bella routinely, every 6 months like recommended. They are the two who go everywhere with me and it seems only fair. As for the other two, I may vaccinate them again when we are preparing for another mama. But since I am greatly anticipating a break from puppy rearing that can wait a bit.
Poor dogs, everyone is hacking up a lung over here. All except for Lollie…hmm. She has such a strong immune system I wonder if she’ll succumb? As a puppy, she lived with a littler mate who had Parvo (a very serious case of it, requiring 16 days in intensive care in the hospital to overcome it) and she was fine. Never caught it. We will see.
Lollie can be playful too
I wrote last week about Lollie, about my struggles with coming to terms with her dog aggressiveness and my role in contributing to it. It was a long post and took a lot out of me. But it is true and real. But it is also not the whole story. Lollie is a dog that is very intense…in good and bad ways, or rather, in ways that I like and ways that challenge me.
One incident has always stayed with me. Lollie was in the height of her dog aggressiveness when my son was just a toddler. Lollie was sound asleep on her pillow when my newly walking son tripped and fell completely across her. He fell hard. He fell like a board, no knee down first just a full out topple. Lollie woke with a screaming child sprawled across her (my son didn’t like falling) and all she did was struggle to her feet, blinking her eyes, trying, it seemed, to orient herself. She did not lash out, she did not growl, she did not cringe, she did not cry out herself. She just got up, dazed, figured out what was going on and when she realized he had fallen she wagged her tail and looked sheepish, like she was somehow responsible. That has always stayed with me. That in her most vulnerable, awakened in a way that must have been completely startling and very likely painful, she was not the least bit aggressive. I would have woken with a growl, I am sure of it. I am not joking. I do not take kindly to being woken up, even gently. That she responded in that way has always amazed me. I must admit it has made me feel safe about my son and her playing together.
Lollie & a pup at play
Another story comes to mind. My son’s was a bit older, like 3, and I was working in the yard. I became aware that he wasn’t pestering me and I went looking for him. I saw him sitting next to Lollie who was panting hard (it was a very very hot day). He was throwing grass into her mouth, covering her tongue. She ignored it until her tongue was completely coated and then she would close her mouth, work the grass out, and begin panting again. He would laugh and begin throwing grass into her mouth again. Needless to say I “rescued” her from him but again, her complete tolerance of him really touched me.
Lollie is the only one in the pack who knows who each of us are by name and will “go get” each of us on command. Including the dogs. She is the only one I trust off leash because she is so attached to me she won’t go far for long. And she is the only one who really likes playing with me, frisbee, ball, whatever. When I was taking her to agility classes it was clear that she loved to please me. But she was so sensitive that whenever I got frustrated with myself (or her) she would completely shut down and refuse to work anymore. But when we were good, working as a team, and we finished a run well, I would say, “yeah! Good GIRL Lollie!” and she would JUMP into my arms, wriggling with joy, knowing I was proud of her, knowing she did good.
Here is a video of her and I playing frisbee in our snowy yard, with Bella and Hermes joining in:
Dealing with Dog Aggression
I’ve been thinking about aggression a lot lately. I have been reading a book by Stephen J. Joubert called Final Hope: Gaining Control of Your Aggressive Dog. I like this book because it is well organized. I also like how clear it is and how matter of fact it is. It has a section on how to identify whether or not you actually have an aggressive dog and chapters on what to do about each type of aggression – fear aggression, dominance aggression and dog aggression. I like the manner in which he frames the work as “going to war” because that is exactly how it feels. And I know. Believe it or not, one of my dogs is dog aggressive.
I obtained Lollie when she was about 8 weeks old, maybe more, maybe less. She was born around the first of December, 2004 to a mother who looked VERY Pit Bull-ish. She was part of a large litter who was born in a shed outside, moved to a shelter and lived in a cage for a while, separated from her mother then driven (for 2 days) up to Northern Illinois, and parked in a basement until I picked her and two of her littermates up to take to my house near the end of January. These were my first ever foster dogs. My beloved dog Sadie had died of lymphoma just three weeks prior to their arrival and I was still grieving big time. My heart had a huge hole in it and I knew it wasn’t a good time to get a dog but I wanted to fill that hole up so badly. I thought fostering would be a good idea – a way to give back and get back without getting in too deep when I was still missing Sadie so. Of the three of the pups, I knew Lollie was going to be a handful. She wasn’t as fearful as her litter mate Babe (who she would get into the nastiest of fights with) but she was demanding, obstinate, resistant, and smart, with a seemingly never ending supply of energy. High energy and high dominance is how I would characterize her now – then I just said, “She’s a handful!” I had a feeling that I was in for it when our first family came to look at the pups and I actively steered them away from her. I would look at her and get this feeling like it was out of my hands – we were going to be together forever. I also got a sense that she needed me and I am a sucker for that. I used to say, “Lollie, you are my Buddha.” She has taught me, through necessity, everything I know about dog training.
I outline those early events in Lollie’s life because I used to look to them a lot for an explanation for her dog aggression. Nearly everyone I meet who sees her aggression says, “Oh is she a rescue?” and when I say yes they think that explains it. But she was so young when I got her; her aggression didn’t come from her past did it? Could her aggression be my fault? Those questions haunted me for so long. I have come to the conclusion that, yes, the disruption of her past and her uncertain breeding (could have been from fighting breed stock) are part of the reason she is dog aggressive. But I have come to the conclusion that I am also part of the reason she is dog aggressive. I was so new to dog handling back then and so, so very sad about Sadie. I just wanted to hold on and cry my eyes out and I used Lollie for that – she was supposed to comfort me, fill me up, make me forget my sadness, and take Sadie’s place; too tall an order for a little mongrel pup.
I was also afraid of her – she was part Pit Bull after all, and they are dangerous dogs, right? And even though I trained her well and early (she was the best behaved in her puppy class) and even though I socialized her well and early (we went to the dog park 5 times a week when she was a pup), I was still always afraid that I’d see aggression in her. And what did I eventually see? Of course I’m not saying that I made it happen with my thoughts or anything like that, but expecting to see aggression and fearing I’d see aggression clouded my ability to actually see what was going on with her and take appropriate steps. I can’t tell you the number of days that I would leave the dog park humiliated and ashamed telling myself, “she didn’t mean it, it was the other dog’s/person’s fault, it won’t happen again.” And some days it didn’t. She had some good doggy friends there and some people who really loved her. But most of the people who saw her, especially as she grew older, were afraid of her and would visibly withdraw from her. If I noticed that you can bet that she did too. At 6 months she began attacking dogs regularly and eventually I figured it out and stopped going to the dog park. I have been through the entire gamut of emotions about her aggression. Since it started so slowly I always feared it would keep getting worse. I became afraid for my son, strangers, kids we’d meet in the street. But she wasn’t aggressive in those settings. But put her with another dog, even one she has known for years, and she’ll try to attack. And it will happen so fast you won’t even see it coming.
I remember the day when I finally accepted her dog aggression. She was playing in the yard with a friend’s dog, Cocoa, one of Bella‘s pups that Lollie had known from puppyhood and had seen weekly for her entire life. I was upstairs looking out the window and saw Lollie in a dominant aggressive stance (tail up, hackles up, stiff legged, facing the dog, head lowered and growling) and I saw Cocoa give a perfect submissive stance (on her back, back leg up, head down and away, ears back). A normal dog will accept this complete submission, maybe rub it in by standing over the submissive dog and staring at it but a posture like that does not trigger a fight…usually. So I am watching this, Lollie above, Cocoa belly up, and I see Lollie lunge and bite Cocoa hard on the belly, repeatedly. Cocoa screams and Lollie keeps biting and Cocoa is struggling to get up and run away but Lollie keeps biting and by now I am screaming out the window and Lollie looks at me and Cocoa gets her feet under her and runs away and Lollie chases her and bites her again. By now I am in the yard (somehow, how did I get out there so fast?) and grab Lollie who goes all submissive on me but I ignore her and go to Cocoa and amazingly there is no blood. No blood? A definite wound, like you’d get if you were bit repeatedly without the skin being broken; swelling and bleeding under the skin but no broken skin. Spit all over her fur on her belly, neck, and back, but no blood. Thank god no blood. I am shaking just remembering it. It was that day that I decided that Lollie was not trustworthy with any dog.
This made life difficult as by then we had acquired Bella and one of Bella’s pups, Hermes. And we also had Brandy, the old matriarch of the bunch who was with us when Sadie was alive. Lollie and Bella fought a lot in those early days and Bella took the worse of it. She suffered many attacks from Lollie and although they did not draw blood, she would often have long teeth scratches on her neck that you could see through her thick fur. I felt terribly responsible and confused as to what to do and began to hate Lollie for all this unpleasantness. Lollie also attacked Brandy a lot and these attacks sometimes drew blood when Lollie’s teeth caught Brandy’s soft ear flaps. As I write this I realize what I nightmare I lived through – sometimes we’d have a fight a day in the house. I didn’t let myself fully realize how out of control things were getting; I just keep reading and trying to figure it out. I went through a period where I wanted to get rid of her. Those rare times when she’d run off I was secretly relieved. I just didn’t want to deal with her aggressiveness anymore.
Around this time I learned of Cesar Millan and began watching his videos. I would stop and play back scenes that pertained to my struggles with Lollie, trying to find the key to solving this conflict. I began walking all my dogs, at the same time, as he suggested and that helped. I also began to fully understand that I am the alpha in the pack, not Lollie. She may take her position over the other dogs but I am the number one. And then someone told me something that really helped me – I am number one, Mike is number two, my son is number three and Lollie is number 23, Hermes is number 24, Bella 25 and Brandy 26. Lollie is SO far below me that she has no way of ever usurping me. I began to feel more confident with Lollie and less afraid. Actually, I began to get angry. “Enough is enough! I am through with you being aggressive! This is going to stop, NOW!”
I kept up with Lollie’s obedience training throughout this time. I train with a great group called the Fox Valley Dog Training Club and at the club Lollie had to deal with a great number of on leash dogs in her space. I had a teacher that would work with me on her aggressiveness and I began to feel less ashamed and more confident. This was a problem my dog had and I was being a responsible dog owner by helping her work with it. It wasn’t an indictment about my worth as a dog owner. As her obedience skills improved and my confidence improved I began to be able to see her getting ready for an attack and block it. If I missed her cues and she lunged I would correct her with an “alpha roll” that I had trained her to do on voice command. I say “OVER” and she lies down and rolls to her side and puts her head down on the floor. She is to hold that position until I release her. Sometimes she’ll hold it for 45 minutes. It isn’t “cruel” she could go to sleep (and often does, when at home) in that position. It is a way I have to control her urge to be aggressive and communicate that I am in charge and I do not appreciate that sort of behavior. This has been my main communication tool. I have also gotten clear about what the rules of the house are and I enforce them 100%. Rule number one: NO aggression, that includes staring hard at another dog (Lollie’s early indicator of an attack) or growling. No taking other dog’s possessions (if you have it in your mouth it is yours unless I want it, then it is mine). No hassling other dogs (that includes pushing them off of a pillow you want or pushing them away from me), and no pulling on the leash when we walk. The rest of the rules are looser and I probably should enforce them more – no pushing past people on the stairs, no leaving or entering unless I say it is ok and then only after me and the other humans go first, no excessive barking, no chewing people stuff (toys, papers, garbage), no counter surfing (happy to say my dogs do not do this), and no jumping up on people (only Lollie does this, big surprise). There are probably more but I can’t think of them right now.
I write all this to give you a sense of what it is like to discover you have an aggressive dog and what it is like to come out the other side of this nightmare. Most dogs slowly reveal their aggressiveness. It is sort of something that builds over time. It is something that they learn. They try aggression and get what they want and are motivated to do it again. It is difficult to accept the truth of their aggressiveness because then you have to DO SOMETHING about it. I have thought long and hard about what to do about Lollie. I have even contemplated euthanizing her. In fact, I hold that option in my mind at all times. It actually helps me see her with more compassion – I literally hold her life in my hands. It helps me get into the mindset of being her steward and helps me take on the responsibility of being her owner. But we have found a way to work with her aggressive tendencies. Training and clear and consistent rules are a must. Daily structured exercise is a must. A daily pack walk for 2.5 miles minimum is a must, regardless of weather. Weekly training is a must. Strong leadership from me is a must. Blocking her aggression before it gets to an aggressive act is a must (and sometimes this requires her to be in a muzzle). Keeping my head clear, my emotions steady and my focus in the present is a must. With all of this I am happy to report that Lollie’s dog aggressiveness is under control. I would never say that she is “cured” and for the rest of her life I will not trust her with other dogs off leash. But I do walk her with my three other dogs and include my neighbor’s big female black lab, every day. And when we have fosters who aren’t dog aggressive I include them as well. Lollie will walk, with strange dogs just my two legs away from her, and behave herself. This is the biggest accomplishment I could have ever imagined and I am so proud of her and me for coming this far. So, if you have an aggressive dog, do not despair. But DO something. Face your part, get clear about her triggers and get help training her. And good luck.
Hermes, Lollie & Bella all getting along...
