Since Callie is pretty much healed up at this point we have turned our attention to our next hurdle: what to do with our dog, Milo. I should preface this blog post with a couple of things. First of all, we have had Milo for the past 11 years and he has been an incredible companion. We have never had any problems with him except too much snuggling and dog hair in the house! Secondly, I know that there are many people who won't understand our decision to keep Milo for the time being, but that is ok. Because when we come right down to it, it is our decision but rest assured, we did not come to it lightly or easily and it is not necessarily a permanent decision.
Over the past week we have been doing a *lot* of research on why dogs bite. We came across quite a bit of information that said if a dog bites and they have no history of aggression it can be because of a health problem. Things like, dogs going blind/deaf and they get surprised by toddlers/people sneaking up on them. Thyroid problems are also common causes.
So Bill took Milo to the vet last week, just to see. At that point we were still assuming we would have to get rid of Milo and this was just going to be for information's sake. The vet did a full work up on Milo and didn't find any health problems, except of course for some nasty breath:) Our vet has had a lot of experience with exactly this type of situation, biting dogs. He even gives talks to school kids about how to approach and deal with dogs. So we felt very comfortable in his expertise. He tried to provoke Milo to see if he could get a reaction, but he got none. Bill told the vet where we were in our heads concerning our fear and concerns for our about to expand brood. He said he understood the fear, since he had to put down one of his dogs because they took on some unfortunate new "hobbies" just before their second child was born. The dog started killing small, furry animals. They knew they couldn't keep the dog, so they put him to sleep. That is obviously not the situation with Milo. That story told us that if we did in fact need to put him down, this vet would be straight with us about it. The vet told Bill straight up that he saw no reason that we couldn't keep Milo with a few changes in our household. He referred us to a dog behaviorist/trainer named Kimberly that had a lot of experience with this sort of thing. Bill came home and filled me in and I was shocked. For the first time there was a glimmer of hope! But I tried to temper it by not getting too excited at the prospect of keeping Milo.
I emailed Kimberly about what had happened and that we surmised it had a lot to do with Callie having food and or doing something to Milo to provoke him. She has been very into eyes lately so it wouldn't be a shock to discover that she had shoved her finger in his eye. We have spent the last week or so wishing one of them, Callie or Milo, could tell us what actually happened! Kimberly responded very quickly. The great thing about her is that she is very accessible by phone, text, email plus she is local! She has been doing this type of training for the last 7 years and is very knowledgable. She came to our house on saturday and we met for just over 2 hours. Again, at this point we were still on the fence about Milo. Neither one of us was totally convinced that we could keep Milo with a toddler and a baby on the way, but we were willing to talk to Kimberly openly and honestly.
We spent the first hour or so just talking about what had happened, our fears and what would be involved in retraining Milo. There was a point that I was almost in tears because I felt overwhelmed at what I felt I was going to be responsible for when Bill returns to work. Kimberly, like our vet, saw no reason that we couldn't keep Milo if we just put a little bit of work in to him. I'm sure Kimberly saw my stress and decided just to jump in and do some of the training with Bill while I held Callie. She had explained that she would be doing the "leave it" exercise after first seeing how well Milo would respond to your basic "sit" and "stay" commands. He did very well with the basic commands, so she moved onto the leave it command. She had explained that with the leave it command he would leave a treat alone and not eat it. When she was explaining it I wanted to throw up my hands and show her the door. I thought to myself "Have you ever done this with a beagle?! There is no way this is going to work. Where is that white flag?" But to my shock, Milo did it within 2 minutes of teaching him the command! I couldn't believe it!
We learned a lot from Kimberly. We had been doing a lot of things wrong with Milo. Most days we would feed him first, more often than not, just to get him out of our hair. What we didn't realize was that was telling Milo that he was the head of our "pack".
Food is obviously a big trigger for what happened on Christmas Eve so we are changing a lot of things in our house concerning food. Now when we are preparing food in the kitchen Milo is not allowed in the room. When we eat in the dining room as a family, he is not allowed in the dining room. Instead he now has "his place" in the living room. If Callie is walking around with snacks like cheese or crackers or whatever, Milo is put outside. We also have an exercise to do with him when he does eat his dog food. When we take him outside to eat we put him in a stay and put down his food. We keep him at stay until we are ready for him to eat. Then after a few seconds of letting him eat we put our foot over the bowl and remove the food and put him back in a stay. Then we release him to eat again. We do this three times. This tells Milo "This is not your food. This is my food and I am allowing you to eat it." Again, when we first started this with Kimberly I was shocked at how well he took to it.
We also talked a lot about boundaries and "ways out". We realized that there was really no place for Milo to go when he was feeling overwhelmed and stressed out by Callie. We are going to put in a dog door in the back door so he can escape if he needs to. We also are going to utilize a few more baby gates, so that if I am feeling too anxious with Callie and when her sister arrives, I can simply put Milo behind one of the gates or just put him outside.
We talked a lot about Milo's personality. It was apparent, very quickly, to Kimberly that Milo is not a follower. He is a leader so we have to be very vigilant in showing him that we are the alphas, including Callie. There are a few ways we do that. We will hold Callie while doing the food exercise with him so he sees her as an extension of us and our dominance. When we take him for walks (which we really had not been doing!) the stroller will always be ahead of him. Kimberly gave us a new harness for him that is similar to the ones that dog handlers use in dog shows. It makes it very easy to control him on walks but is not painful for him like a choke collar.
We also talked about our fears about the baby's arrival. When we all sat down and talked/thought about it, we realized that Milo probably won't see the baby as a threat, just as he was fine with Callie until she got so very mobile and fast. We have also been working a lot with Callie. We no longer keep them in the same room alone, not even for a second. We have been showing her how to be more gentle with Milo. Nice gentle pets on his back or belly, nothing near his head or face. And if she gets too hyper or starts throwing things, as toddlers do at this age, we put Milo back outside to avoid any problems.
Keeping Milo is still not a 100% sure thing. Kimberly is going to come back in two weeks and we are going to check in with her again and work on some new things too. If we are still feeling nervous about having Milo around then we won't keep him because he will pick up on that fear/tension and act accordingly. And if for any reason he shows any type of aggression he is a goner. We do know that if we try to get rid of him it will be tough to get him adopted because of his age and because he bit someone. So we are not kidding ourselves, if we can't keep him he will most likely have to be euthanized. But hopefully the training will continue to go very well as it has been since we started this on saturday and we won't have to make that tough decision and our old guy can live out the rest of his days with us.
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