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H13 posted:What is one thing you wish all new puppy owners knew about having their first puppy? Enforced naps. If your puppy is being even more of an rear end in a top hat than usual, they are probably tired. They won't want to stop the fun and have a nap so you have to make them. This is a lot easier if you're doing crate training, but you can also use an exercise pen or a quiet room with a minimal amount of fun. Having a rough nap schedule in place is also great because you know when you can have a bit of a break from all the puppy chaos. Golden puppies are extremely cute to make up for the fact that they are horrible furry piranhas with evil little needle teeth, so prepare for your hands, socks, etc to be cut to shreds and work on that bite inhibition. Teach the puppy to "trade" for items you want to take off them, rather than just prying them out of their mouth. We did not do this and it made his resource guarding problem a lot worse and I really really wish we had done things differently. HootTheOwl posted:There's "house trained" as in the dog knows it shouldn't. And "house trained" as in it is able not to. This is very true. Our puppy was peeing outside most of the time within a few weeks, but he still had a lot of accidents inside until he was about 6 months old and really learned to hold it. We were also getting up in the middle of the night for pee breaks for the first month or two. Basically there is gonna be a lot of piss inside your house for a while.
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Oct 28, 2022 16:32
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Enfys posted:They will strip and eat paint off the walls of the house (and they will chew on the walls), they will find random bits of plastic from hoses or garden tools or literally anything, and chew it into bits and eat them. They will chew and swallow rocks. They will find things you didn't know and didn't see outside to destroy and eat. They will drive your neighbours insane when they bark at every noise and passing sound and/or cry with loneliness. Yeah, my golden was a genius at 4 months old when it came to discovering new and exciting ways to try to injure or kill himself, and most of that involved chewing things that I did not expect him to want to chew. His sister even had to get emergency surgery for eating some fishhooks she found on the beach. I would absolutely not have trusted him unsupervised in the garden for hours at a time.
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Oct 28, 2022 19:03
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H13 posted:Fair enough. How likely is he to have good indoor manners at that stage so that he could be in the house by himself? I wouldn't leave him outside alone but I wouldn't give him free roam of the whole house either. Confine him to a dog-proofed space like a crate, an exercise pen or a room where you can minimise the amount of damage he does. Of course it will be personality-dependent but chances are at 6 months he will be trying very hard to get into mischief. It's great your dad can come over to check in on him at lunch – how long would he be home alone for at a time?
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Oct 31, 2022 12:17
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That's one cute puppy! If he's barking to be let out and then just wants to have midnight playtime, that's one thing, but if he is actually pooping then you're definitely better off letting him out. My dog's poo schedule was all over the place when he was that age. Puppies have sensitive stomachs. We found that Pro-Kolin probiotic paste was really helpful in, uh, firming things up, although I don't know if that's available where you are.
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Nov 27, 2022 17:37
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My dog found a knife while digging in our back garden once. It was just a butter knife but it was still a surprise to see him walk in the back door with that in his mouth.
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Jan 4, 2023 00:13
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Does he ever guard from humans, or just other dogs?
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Mar 2, 2023 23:18
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Ragnar Gunvald posted:gently caress me, spent the whole night in the vets..I'm exhausted. I'm going to rant a little. So sorry you're going through all this, it sounds beyond stressful. I hope Freya continues to perk up and is back to full puppy energy soon. I'm absolutely not a vet but that level of symptoms isn't what I'd expect from "just full of gas". Is your checkup tomorrow with the same vet as before or was that a separate out-of-hours place? Given her age and the concerns you're now having about the breeder I'd be worried about her littermates being sick as well. Have you had any contact with the breeder about this?
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May 29, 2023 11:06
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Ahh yeah I'm in the UK too, just had some mixed experiences with the out-of-hours vet as well. (But better than no vet in an emergency.) I hope the appointment tomorrow goes better but definitely sounds good that she's full of pep again  One way or another, puppies are determined to deprive you of sleep!
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May 29, 2023 17:58
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Clowner posted:Speaking of, does anyone know any good resources for working on resource guarding? Problem is growing along with the puppy (a corgi, which apparently have an above average inclination to the behavior). Mine! by Jean Donaldson seems to be well-recommended and I found it useful with our dog. I think common advice is also to teach them a "drop" command so they are more likely to willingly give something up and see it as something they get rewarded for, rather than you taking it off them against their will. This is probably a good thing to do even if you're not currently worried about guarding to be honest – my dog didn't seem to mind me pulling things out of his mouth when he was small, but as he got older it became clear that he definitely did mind it. However the biggest thing I wish I'd known about it when we first started dealing with it is to learn your dog's body language for stress and don't push back against them, because it will just end up with them escalating. A dog who learns that tensing up and giving you the whale eye doesn't stop a human from taking something precious away from them is more likely to growl at you next time, and if that doesn't work then it can escalate to a bite. We completely hosed up on this with our puppy (partly because of me panicking about him swallowing things, partly because of listening to terrible "just show him who's boss!" advice) and ended up making his resource guarding issues much worse to the point where we had to get a behaviourist involved. We're much better at managing it now but it is something we still have to be very mindful of, especially when it comes to interacting with other people. We also basically don't try to get anything off him at all now unless it's definitely dangerous to him or very valuable, in which case there's a whole routine where one person distracts him out of the room by "accidentally" dropping a trail of treats and then the other person retrieves the item out of his sight. Sorry, this turned into a bit of a vent but it's probably my biggest regret as a first-time dog-haver and hopefully someone can learn from my mistakes!
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Jul 11, 2023 12:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Does anyone here have any experience with anti-anxiety meds for their dogs? Pavlov is getting the shakes way more often than I'd like these days. I think the fireworks (we're still getting random explosions maybe 1 night in 5) have just generally unsettled him, but now stuff like construction noise is setting him off. Meds for specific occasions like fireworks or longer-term ones for general anxiety? Ours went onto fluoxetine at the end of last year and it's definitely helped him calm down more – he also sleeps significantly better instead of twitching awake at every little thing, which is a big plus.
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Jul 26, 2023 23:49
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H13 posted:I'm taking him to the Vet tomorrow for a checkup where I am sure he will tell me Whiskey is 100% fine and lovely which will probably help me feel better and get my head sorted but yeah. Does anybody else get these head games from time to time? My inexpert diagnosis is that Whiskey is a very good boy. All of this sounds like stuff I went through with my golden as well (including the worrying!) At 8.5 months he's getting into adolesence and it's normal for them to go through different phases where their behaviour is changing, including going through periods where they are more fearful. If he was overwhelmed at the dog wash, then sleeping more afterwards to recover or seeming a little "off" while the stress hormones clear his system is also very normal. Ours also went through stages where he was pickier about his food or decided he didn't want to eat at dinnertime but would then wolf it down before bed. If he's still eating all his food and his weight is fine then I don't think it's cause for concern. Also oh lord the shedding. Your house will just be full of tribbles.
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Aug 15, 2023 09:47
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Flesh Forge posted:Sweet potatoes I can understand because, y'know, the sweet part, I've never seen a dog act so goddamn happy with getting poo poo like a raw potato, or celery, or lettuce Ours loves carrots. Especially frozen ones. He gets so excited he won't even eat it at first, just dances around it.
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Aug 24, 2023 08:41
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neurotech posted:I don't know the time that she goes, unfortunately. I'd need to get some kind of night vision webcam setup or something to be sure. When you say "Then I would get him up before we went to bed, usually a couple of hours after," do you mean you would wake him up at your bed time, take him out to toilet, then do the same a few hours later? I just set alarms at intervals throughout the night and then whenever they went off, I would take the puppy outside, give him the opportunity to pee and then praise him if he did. It was definitely rough on the sleep schedule but I do think it helped in getting him potty trained relatively quickly.
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Aug 28, 2023 12:31
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My dog still has his original, non-prosthetic balls, on the advice of our vet and our veterinary behaviourist. We had always planned to neuter him once he'd finished growing, but he has a lot of anxiety issues and both of them said that castration would potentially make him more anxious (apparently because of the reduced testosterone?) So he's kept them for now and we've agreed to re-evaluate how things go. The downsides are that neutered males occasionally start poo poo with him and a lot of boarders won't take him, but most boarders aren't a good fit for him anyway due to the aforementioned anxiety so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Dog parks aren't really a thing where we live so that's not been an issue.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:23
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i own every Bionicle posted:Newton’s verdict on snow: 12/10 Awww. So nice to see him doing so well!
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Jan 8, 2024 19:07
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Hello 
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Jan 30, 2024 17:52
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 10:43 |
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Aww, it's really lovely seeing him so happy  What a good boy
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Mar 14, 2024 14:08
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