Dog Stories: Rufus Improves and a Pissing Contest

First, the outbreak of un-housebreaking that has occurred all of a sudden. I thought I was going to get off easy with these new dogs. Rufus did very little marking and it looked like Bella (the lab) was going the same way. But suddenly the other day I found both a pee spot and then a pet bed was liberally peed in and while I was cleaning that up, someone dropped some poop. Ahg! What happened to my luck. I suppose if this is the primary way this pack "storms" then I should feel lucky, but I'm left wondering what has changed in the dynamics to create this. Since these incidents didn't happen while I was in the room, everyone is on crate-or-yard confinement until I can figure out what is going on. I do walk them or take them singularly into a room with me at times so it's not as restrictive as it sounds.

Rufus has been going through a lot of changes over the last couple of weeks. They're little changes generally so it's good there's lots of them. First, he showed a greater inclination to glance at me while on walks, which shows an increased awareness of how we're connected by the leash. To deal with his general anxiety, we now do creep-walk, which is a slow motion walk with him in the heel position. At first, I did this when I saw him getting a little wild-eyed and was doing a lot of circling around me, which is to say when he was not feeling directly threatened by something but still feeling anxious. He was still too unglued by, say, a human being out in a yard, to accomplish a creep-walk when directly confronted by such a horror. I just let him do some staring and circling as we kept walking.

One day, when I thought he had done quite well passing a guy who was working on his house and that we were well beyond that scenario still being a consideration, the man threw something large and clattery into his garbage can and Rufus shot past me in a complete panic. He'd been coming around behind me from the right to the left (heeling) side and so I was able to do most of my restraining of him with my shoulder rather my arms or hands but it still sent a tingle down my arm. We had to creep-walk after that just to be sure it didn't happen again before we were really out of range.

Why does creep-walk work? I'm not sure. Perhaps it's because he needs to focus more on me rather than the thing he's afraid of. Perhaps it's because he feels safer when he's kept that close to me. Perhaps it's because we're then dealing much more slowly with the scary stimulus (or the scary world in general). Whatever the case, I've used it liberally over the past week, as well as lots of circling and serpentines. I'm sure I seem like the crazy lady with the crazy shepherd to casual onlookers, especially today.

Today we ran what, for Rufus, is a gauntlet. There's a man on a corner who has a big barrel barbecue. He was cleaning it with lots of clinking and clanking. It took lots of serpentines and circles to get up to and around the corner. Then his wife was suspiciously taking things out to the garbage, not once but twice (so scary and unpredictable, doubling back like that) and without any respite there was a group of 5 kids playing, scurrying around screeching like little demons. They were so traumatizing that he didn't even notice the man on the other side of the road who was hacking up his front yard. And then, after a mini-breather of only one house, there were two girls screaming and chasing each other around a house. We survived it all with the creep-walk.

I don't know how long it took us to get past that little stretch of road but the rest of the walk was pretty relaxed. We even got in a little playfulness. Still, we had to return back through the gauntlet and this time there was an unexpected BANG shortly after turning the corner (at the opposite end of the street from the barbecue corner). This time he managed not to try to take my arm off, perhaps only because I was holding him fairly close to me. He flew around in front of me but then stood still. He recovered fairly quickly from his fright as we continued slowly down the street. A man who had just come home and moved his garbage cans was only mildly terrifying. The girl on the trampoline was much more difficult and then there was the man who was hoeing his yard, who Rufus saw this time.

What's lovely is that sometimes people are aware of what I'm trying to do. The children often suspend their play when they see it's agitating the dog and their settling doesn't seem to be out of fear. They seem curious. The man with the hoe stopped hoeing. As we approached, he half-turned and smiled with a nod. His back was to the road and he remained that way, perfectly still, until we were past his property. The couple at the corner, though, were all business, and still engaged in some noisy operations. Rufus got into such a tizzy that he wouldn't say hello to the little beagle right behind him who he had previously shown an interest in and today finally seemed willing to greet him if he would only turn around. But no. I touched her nose through the fence a couple of times while he stared at the busy-body monsters.

At last we were clear and everything was fine for the rest of the walk. He might have been mistaken for a normal dog. That was a lot of anxiety producing stimulation for him and I'm relieved that he managed to do it without a complete freakout. I think he'll always be a dog with limitations. What I've found online about this sort of "nervy" behavior tells me that it's genetic with limited ability to alter through training or exposure. But I'm gaining hope that he'll eventually be able to get through the neighborhood without a panic attack, one creep-step at a time.

At home an interesting development is shepherding behavior. I didn't know how much I'd see of that. First I noticed his being unsettled because all of the dogs weren't in the same room. He's going to have to get over that. Then today I was on the back stoop calling Bella, who was blissfully ignoring me not far from the foot of the steps. I figured, "well, that tells me she hasn't connected with the name yet." But suddenly what does Rufus do? He hops off the stoop, pokes Bella, rubs up against her as he turns to return to me, bringing Bella with him. It hadn't ever occurred to me he would do that, let alone with such efficiency. And I was equally surprised with how readily Bella was herded. Rufus has tried to "herd" me sometimes during walks, mainly by blocking me when he doesn't want to go toward something. He did it much more early on and hardly ever now so I'd lost sight of the shepherd side of him until these recent developments.

And that ends this lengthy update. Kudos to anyone who read it to the end!