July!?

Hard to believe that it’s July already, this has been one heck of a year. But we managed to get through the worst holiday, which really has been just another realization of how incredibly self centered our society is:

“how about teach your dogs to deal with loud noises. How fucking dumb are you to think that I should change my lifestyle because of someone’s dumb shit dog that cant deal with fireworks”

I have lost a lot of faith in the basic goodness of humanity the last few years, that’s for sure. Sigh.

Anyway, we spent the 4th up at Maddy’s until about midnight, there were still fireworks, but not as close. Navarre got to hang out in Maddy’s house with the fan and tv and he seemed more pissed about FOMO than worried about the noise. At home he’s been set up with the fan with Alexa music back in his crate in the closet. We’ve been getting the melatonin on board this week, and I don’t know if it’s made a difference or not – but he’s certainly just been sleeping in there, all tucked in with his thunder shirt. A pretty good 4th of July for him, a few incidences of unexpected explosions during daylight hours caught us unaware, but he seemed to handle it all pretty well. The goal is always just to make it through without making him any worse, and I think we achieved that.

Asher and Haku remain unaffected, but I’ll be curious to see if that changes with Asher – I think Navarre didn’t notice when he was younger. Asher’s brother and sister are really worried about them, so it’s there in the family. But so far, so good – next year we shall see.

Pico went to his new home, which I was thrilled he ended up with Julie. Fingers crossed it works out, last I heard he had fit right in. He certainly did here, it was so easy to have him and the dogs really enjoyed him. It did very much make me miss Bright, Pico was always right next to me, just like she was. I miss my Brightness. Asher was pretty sad to see his playmate go, they were non-stop while Pico was here – though Navarre and Asher have been playing more since. Though Navarre is always very strict on how much playing there will be.

As for Navarre, he’s continued on his pain meds and has continued to pee normally. We’re just about done with those, so we shall see what happens now. I didn’t notice any changes other than the peeing, he didn’t seem to me moving or acting any differently. We did just a little bit of agility at 16 inches and I didn’t see anything different (though he was very happy to play!).

He’s now seen Maddy twice, and she felt his pelvic floor was less … I don’t remember the term, but restricted maybe? His ‘mowhawk’ has actually laid back down on very lower back near the tail, which he carries differently after being adjusted. He still has a fierce mowhawk in the midback though. Maddy thought he was definitely tight in his groin, but was not thinking illiopsoas injury so much as guarding. Possible that he just did something to injure himself and with the anti-inflammatories and treatment maybe he’ll return to normal. He did NOT have any of this going on when she saw him back mid-March. So something new.

The current plan is to continue to see Maddy every week, see what happens once he’s off the pain meds and get some x-rays of his back. Possibly see about getting in to see Patrice the osteopath down in Eugene. We’ve been taking it easy this week and all the dogs are pretty tired of that plan. We shall see.

Meanwhile, we also had a very weird and unexplained complete rear end lameness from Asher that lasted about 12 hours … and then magically disappeared just the way it came. I’m talking non-weight bearing pogo stick. Not showing any signs of discomfort upon examination, he was just charging through life three legged – no idea why. Earlier that day we had hiked and herded with no signs of an issue, but that afternoon I took some video of him and Pico playing and I could see him heavily favoring it. Then he took a nap and woke up non-weight bearing. I gave him meta-cam but he was still non-weight bearing the next morning. As he seemed already broken I let him play with Pico one last time before he headed off to his new home – and suddenly Asher was using it just fine. Since then I haven’t seen a single sign of an issue. We took it easy for a few days, but then tried it out in a variety of situations including agility – no sign there was anything wrong. So … yeah … I’m still suspicious, waiting for it to happen again, but so far, no sign of anything.

Anyway, other than all the drama – did a bit of sequencing with Asher in agility last week. As usual, it took awhile for us to pull it together, but I was happy to see that he finally seemed to have grasped serpentines and committing to the jump with my opposite motion. Was interesting watching the video as I obviously don’t trust him AT ALL, so my handling is really tentative and late. We need to work on that!  No dogwalk we could lower last week or this week, so running contacts are on hold. Hopefully they magically solidify in his brain like the serpentine during the break. Really would like to get that squared away, then we can look at teeter – but I don’t want to do both at the same time. He is just a baby, in both body and mind, no rush.

Asher does seem to be going through a teenage stage, where he’s getting pushier testing boundaries. We went to see Dave, the first time in long time and Asher was just randomly taking himself on outruns while I was trying to talk to Dave, which has not been an issue before. We are, uh, not having the issue of him being TOO willing to drop the sheep and come into me these days anymore – he’s feeling quite certain he knows what to do. Boy, who does THAT sound like? He is doing better with his driving, though sometimes he’ll just keep sneaking past to try to turn them.

We worked on some new heavier sheep that Maddy has and it was hilarious the first time I set him on an outrun he got up there and didn’t know what to do when they didn’t immediately just start running – he actually had to lift them! He figured it out, but that was funny. Need to work on him actually knowing his flanks so we can work more on his inside flanks. He’s a good boy and a lot of fun.

Now, Navarre thinks the new heavy sheep are STUPID, he was quite clear with his opinion on sheep of this nature. He’s been funny on sheep, as he does have such internal conflict about herding these days. He knows he needs to listen, but it’s so hard for him – so he does do displacement behaviors like eating sheep poo. And I feel bad for him, and we actually don’t argue that much these days – but it his conflict doesn’t really come from worry about ‘being wrong’ so much as it’s always been super hard for him to actually have to listen and herd. I don’t know how to help him other than doing my best not add extra conflict, but, yeah, he doesn’t have the ‘lightness’ that Asher does about the whole activity. He did impress Dave with how well he was listening with his whistles at Open level distances. Well, at first, but when we tried again he started just making it up again. He has it in him, and he can do very well – but it’s not easy for him. We continue to work on whistles and pace, baby steps in the right direction.

Very thankful we have a place to practice now, makes such a huge difference! And the new sheep Maddy just got have been working out well. Hopefully someday we can go up and use the big field as well, which will let us practice some bigger outruns.