Dog Quirks

Beep...beep....beep.......

This is the sound of my dog backing out of the kitchen.
The lure of any kind of food will bring my dog into the kitchen like a lightening bolt. Once she has managed to puppy-dog-eye her way into getting a little piece of whatever I am making, she leaves the room. Backwards. She will not walk right through, but willl turn around and go butt first out the door. She will not walk out face first and starts to panic if you try to make her. I think it's because the floor is tile. Maybe she had a Bambi-on-ice moment when she was a pup.

Possibly related, is her longish toenails. You see, she is a rotti cross, and rotti's are know to have issues with people touching their feet. Sure when she was a pup, we used to purposely touch her feet and trim her nails, in an effort to get her used to it, but one day (no she wasn't hurt) she just decided not to allow it anymore. She pulls her paws away, snarls, cowers, and gives us the evil eye, and I think she also uses the ultimate weapon, passing gas to keep us away. We can try by holding her, or nicely coax her with lots of treats, but no go.



The last time she had them trimmed well, was when she was knocked out getting x rays, after getting her knee surgery last fall. Otherwise, it is just the ends of the longest nails that get trimmed, usually a couple at a time. Our middle daughter has the most success with her.
If you have a rotti, be aware that this is one of their little quirks, they often hate having their feet touched, but if you do it gently and often when they are young, you may have a chance at having less problems when they are older. Didn't work for us, but that's kind of the norm around here.

Problem for the day

First night was not tooooo bad. The dog wanted to be where she usually is at night, in our room. So we sectioned off a part of it for her, and she was very happy. The only thing is that we didn't want to put the big collar on her because we figured she would hate, hate , hate it and would probably bang around a lot and keep us awake. Instead we chose to leave it off, and since I am a light sleeper and my hubby wakes up a few times in the night usually, we decided we would keep our ears open for any sounds of her licking her incision too much.

Of course neither of us got much sleep, because every time she licked her lips, our heads popped up to look at her. May try the collar tonight.

Today's task, is to figure out the peeing situation. To go outside, there is a fairly steep set of stairs (I think about 10 steps) She doesn't want to go down them and she's really not supposed to if we can help it. We got her down once, by helping with a belly strap to lift her a bit. She didn't like that and didn't want to come back in the house. My husband picked her up and carried her in. Quite a struggle and I wouldn't want him to try and carry her down. Kind of dangerous. There is no way I could get her up and down on my own.

Our solution, to turn our deck which is off the living/dining room area where she is being kept, , into a mini back yard.
We are tracking down a little bit of turf and will put it on our deck. It will be her own little space place for the next couple of months.

Okay, here we are. Very, very strange, I know, but it worked. We hose it down after she goes, so it doesn't get stinky. At least it's safer than risking our, and her life and limb getting her up and down the stairs. The things we do for our pets, eh?