dogs' vision compared to ours

Browsing the Dog Trick Academy, I came across a link to an interesting article about how dogs see.

I've often noticed than when something is thrown for Penny to fetch, she waits for a moment before setting off. (And how wonderful it is that many years down the track after her cruciate operation, she is able to run once again. We don't do much throwing for her, though. We're still aware she has a weakness in that leg.)

If it's a long way away, she will circle in a way that makes me think she's depending more on smell than sight.

a dog hunts rats

Penny has been taking it quietly lately, because she seems to be limping quite badly at times. We've been sticking to short street walks. I think I might have overdone it by taking her on a two-hour walk in the Upper Yarra Valley recently. (But she had a great time!).

We'll go to the physio next week to see how her recovery from cruciate surgery is going. And we've started doing her home therapy more regularly. I think we had become complacent, even though we have been told her leg will never be the same as it was before she injured it.

But today she spent her time rushing down the back steps to check out some intruder in the lush growth in our backyard - growth that is the happy result of all the lovely rain we've had lately.

I think we have rats in the garden once again. She stalked them (or it?) around the garden beds for ages, her slowly waving tail the usual indication that she was on the hunt. It was good to see she was using all four legs to go down the steps, but she did hop the last step on three legs.

day sixteen after extracapsular cruciate repair

Day sixteen and Penny seems to be feeling well. These mornings we go out to the backyard, because I got s-o-o tired of standing out in the street waiting for her to wee or poo. The final straw was the day my neighbor stopped her car to talk to me and Penny tried to jump up to say hello and while I was holding her down, the youngsters across the road passed by with their four dogs, and then in the middle of it all an off-lead dog raced by. Penny was going ballistic and I grabbed her up in my arms and carried her inside and put her in her crate.

I guess it was then that inspiration struck and I realised I could put a ramp down on the side steps at the back if I took away one of the planks from our front ramp and added it to the remaining spare plank that was lying around the garden.

This was one of the few occasions where I felt like leaving it to someone else to follow up on the loose dog that had raced past. I'm pleased to say I didn't do that. I took Penny's lead and went up and down the street to look for the dog. But I didn't find it and I haven't heard anything about a lost dog.

The move to our own backyard is very pleasant and now Penny relieves herself regularly in the mornings (number one and number two, to put it delicately, lol).

We visited the vet yesterday and he said Penny is going well with her recovery, bearing weight on the operated leg. Today I even reduced the Metacam dose to see whether she continues to use the leg, and I think she is okay. I'd like to get her off it as soon as possible, but the vet says the pain relief it brings will enable her to use her leg more confidently and thus heal more fully.

It's tempting to allow her to do more, but, thanks to the internet, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence about how important it is to take things slowly.

using movies cameras to spy on our dogs

Isn't modern technology wonderful?

I've been using our video camera to see how Penny is behaving when I'm not around.

Here are two clips of her behaviour at mealtimes. One in the evening eleven days after her extracapsular traditional cruciate ligament operation, and then also the next morning. We've been told to expect her to be using her operated leg by the fourteenth day, so I think we're on track for that.

a dog discovers she still has a left hind leg

Eight days out from the cruciate operation (extracapsular) and we were still having to either entice Penny to move, or having to carry her. And yet the receptionist at the physiotherapy clinic said that the sooner she started using the leg the better the recovery was likely to be (within reason, of course). The vet thought she would be touching it to the ground in the next couple of days. But it wasn't happening. Why?

And then I thought of some of the old advice about training puppies and dogs:

• don't fuss over them;


• don't keep watching them or they might feel overwhelmed by the attention;


• if they don't eat their food quickly, take it away;


• make them come to you, don't go to them;


• don't give a command or ask for a behaviour if you know they won't do it.

For months, we've been ignoring these suggestions, and Penny has ruled the roost as we worried about what could be wrong with her leg. Training went out the window, along with discipline. And now we've been seeing the result. She pulls us at a three-legged run when she goes out for a toilet break (despite the physio instruction that she should move slowly everywhere she goes) and she waits on her mat for her food to be delivered, and believes it should be pushed right next to her mouth if it's more than ten centimetres away from her.

So... it was time yesterday for tough love. Luckily I had a strong-minded friend visiting, who helped me stick to my resolve.

I put a biscuit on the kitchen floor, in a place Penny could see from her comfortable place near the front door.



I waited.

The crying began softly at first. Then louder. Then louder. I might be anthropomorphising, but I think it said, 'Oh, I'm a poor little hungry puppy with a sore leg and it would be a long painful journey to the kitchen to get that delicious-looking biscuit. Won't someone bring it to me?"

We drank our cups of tea and stayed firm.

And then... click, clicketty, hoppitty click. Penny hurried past on three legs, occasionally touching her left rear leg to the ground. She had remembered that she does have four legs and she can move around.If the motivation is strong enough.

Those biscuits can work miracles. (As I've discovered in the past.)

the Great Saga of the Poo

Okay... imagine this. You're in the car park of the Animal Emergency Clinic, about fifteen kilometres from home and it's four in the morning. Your dog, after shivering and panting in pain on the rush across town in the middle of the night, is now running full pelt around the car park, you hanging onto the leash and running behind her, so your tugging doesn't pull her off balance.

Yep, it's day four after the cruciate ligament surgery.

You check on Penny in the night and find her in lots of pain. Ring the University Clinic where she had her surgery (many, many kilometres from home). Tell them her symptoms. Maybe you should go to the nearest emergency clinic, the voice on the phone suggests. You decide to go to the one you have the most respect for. You drive there, resisting the temptation to run the red lights (and resisting the voice of your companion urging you to do just that).

You arrive there, carry her in, put her on the ground, oh so delicately, and she hurries across the room, wagging her tail, to greet the nurse. What??? She seems okay. But then she's not so good. She hurtles across to the door and you go out with her and she races all over the place, hopping along at top speed on three legs, crouches and out comes a flood of urine. Whew! The trip was worth it even to achieve this.

Inside to tell the nurse she seems a lot better. Then she's off again, hurtling along the footpath and onto the grass of the nature strip.

And then, it finally happens. The Great Poo. Twice. Oh, the relief she must feel at getting something moving after five days! We can relax now, having read that it's only after five days that we should start to worry if there is no bowel movement.

The vet nurse tells us we can stay in the waiting room for fifteen minutes to see if Penny's fine. The staff have emergency cases in the hospital that take priority over Penny.

We wait until another nurse comes out to greet a new client who's vomiting blood. We thank the nurse and head off home.

Tired but happy.

Penny rests her cruciate ligament

As Penny rests, and hopefully recovers her health, I’ve been learning more about cruciate ligament injuries. Until this scare I hadn’t realised how prevalent they are in the dog world.

I’ve come across a great Yahoo group, where generous people share their experience of canine orthopaedic issues. I posted a question based on our experience and feel encouraged by what I’ve learned so far:

• Some dogs, if their cruciate is not too badly injured, can recover enough to live a good life without needing surgery. One member said her dog was managed conservatively for 8 years before needing surgery, and another member said that dogs who don’t have a significant injury can do well. She had a dog who did well.



• Make a rehab plan, realise it may be months before Penny is completely well, and don't assume she is recovered just because the limp goes away.



• If all goes well, we’ll go to short walks in the street, longer walks in the street, and then eventually some play in the backyard to see how she goes.



• Being overweight is a big problem for dogs (uh oh!), and being only sporadically active can cause injuries.( I think we don’t have to feel bad about that one, because Penny has been active every day since we got her, barring times when she wasn’t well or there was some difficulty getting out for exercise.)



• It's important to make sure she builds up her strength equally on each side, so that she is symmetrical. (Having a disc problem myself has made me aware of this, as for thirty years I have tended to favor one side of my body, and so I know the problems this brings.)

A few sites I've bookmarked are:
Dealing with Cruciate Ligament Injuries in Labrador Retrievers

Veterinary Orthopedic Sports Medicine Group

Mar Vista Animal Medical Center

Miss Sunshade (yet another gorgeous Airedale) has a very interesting and informative site about her stem cell treatment for an injury.

the blue dog of anxiety

Penny's such a cheerful dog that it seems strange that we use the term 'the black dog' for depression. I hadn't heard of 'the blue dog' - anxiety - until I visited the Flowerdale - Survivor Spirit blog tonight.

I like to visit this site as often as possible to read about the courage of the people of this devastated town, trying to get on with their lives after the terror of the February bushfires.

I've posted about the horrible, unseasonable heat we had last week - even we, living in suburbia, feel afraid of what this summer will bring. But it's nothing to what the people of the burned-out towns must feel. Here's a poem by Peter Auty about the anxiety attack he suffered recently, when the terrible heat brought back memories of the fires.