Go, Speed Racer

Last night the family enjoyed an evening of indoor go-karting. We went to G-Force Karts, where I had a gift card received for Mother's Day. 

The nice thing, especially for us new to this thrilling activity, is that it was "family night," where each group has a period of time on the track by themselves, so you are racing against friends and/or family, and you don't have to worry about the experienced speed demons crashing into you. 

We registered, signed about a million waivers that give them the right to discard your crumpled remains, or let them sue you for staining their track with your blood.... I don't know; I didn't read them. Let's go RACIN'!  We actually said, "boogity boogity." 

We were gathered before a huge poster listing the rules, the meaning of all of the signals and flags that we might see during our race, and the track staff reviewed each point. We nodded in unison, not seeing any of the signs or flags, and not caring. Let's goooooo, lady. Pedal to the metal and get ahead of everyone - what's so hard about that?

We suited up in some (filthy, nasty, sweat-stained) awesome neck collars to protect you as your head whips around due to the MASSIVE motorcycle helmet you need to wear. Or, let's clarify, the MASSIVE helmets my entire family need to wear because of our oversized craniums (crania, actually). No worries! Who needs peripheral vision or the ability to see over your shoulder? Not us! Woo Hoo! 

The track cleared of the previous group of racers, we were assigned karts. The kids got the junior karts and us grownups got the adult size. Adjustments were made so that we were comfortable, and they started our mowers (um, motors) with the pull string. We were at last turned loose on the track! 

It. Was. Awesome. I really enjoy driving, and I enjoy driving much more when I can feel the machine and feel the road, which is not really possible in my living-room-on-wheels that is the Ford Expedition. I'm basically sitting on a sofa and steering the thing through traffic, which is great for road trips and transporting a group of people ("here, kids, watch this DVD!"), but it does not satisfy my need for the physical sensation of powering a machine through time and space. 

After a lap or two I got the feel and was able to really let loose, and felt the sensation of the G-forces around the turns, just like the name of the track suggests. The younger kids had never driven anything before, so there was a bit of a learning curve to operate the kart and figure out how to brake with the left foot and accelerate with the right, but they soon got the hang of it. Unfortunately, my husband was ahead of me out of the gate and I never caught him, though I tried. I kept getting stuck behind the slower kids, who blocked the track, and I had to maneuver carefully to get around them. In the end, R finished in first place, I was in second, our oldest in third, and the twins of course in the last two places. I was only 2 seconds behind R for the finish, but that really burned my toast! 

I am very (very) competitive, so this was a blast for me. I care about nothing other than catching and passing him, though I was able to quash that bitter aggression and not ram into the kids. I was getting a stomach ache from having to wait for them to get outta my way, but I really wanted to ram those little darlings! I think we were able to go about 30 mph, which to me seems slow but on an indoor hairpin turn track it was pretty darn zippy. Now I want to go back, and doing that every day would not be a problem for me. I'm actually sore in my arms today from gripping the wheel and making the turns, since at speed you really have to hold on. 

The facility could not be nicer, and when we were done we were given a printout of our performance (if I had known I was being clocked and evaluated like that I'd have tried harder - dang it!) and we got to take home our head socks. I wish we'd been given a neck sock, but oh well, that's what showers are for, right? We all wore our head socks in the car on the way home. Cuz that's how we roll. 

P.S. My dear R, love of my life, recognizes my need for speed and power, and I have to thank him for facilitating this passion of mine. After the race I was very pumped up and exhilarated, and he knows I love it. One year he gave me a Richard Petty Racing Experience, where I drove a NASCAR car at Richmond International Raceway, which was one of the most exciting things I've ever done, and I adored that, too. He's a doll and I'm lucky to have someone like him, who wants nothing more than for me to be happy. 

I Smell the Smelly Smell of Something Smelly

Sirius has, umm, issues with his bum. There's really no way to describe it without sounding juvenile or corny, but he has infected anal glands and a rectal tumor, which is likely the cause of his infected anal glands. 

I've had him to the new vet a couple of times for lab studies and a general checkup, where she discovered the infected gland issue. We had no idea this was going on, since he gave no indication other than an occasional whiff of that signature anal gland smell, which is fishy, musky, and I don't know what else, but gross. All of our dogs have had that smell from time to time, and they go out and poop and that's the end of it. Well, his problem was pretty severe, and it took 14 days of two separate antibiotics to battle it. Return for follow-up and now that the infection has cleared the vet found the very bloody and vascular tumor, which she showed me (thank you very much for that, Dr. B, I can't unsee things, now can I?). Actually, being a medical person I wanted to see it so I could get an idea of what he has going on, and it is maybe the size of a walnut and is quite bloody, and seems to be made up of blood vessels, or at least the surface is. 

I hope this is a benign mass or polyp, not terribly uncommon, but it is causing problems where it is and interfering with proper pooping, thus contributing to inadequate natural anal gland expression. 

So far I'm about $500 in with the vet from the initial visit and the follow-up visit, and the surgery will run us $1400 or so. This is not good, because I don't have the money. We had to spend $3000 on a rebuilt transmission for the Ford Focus, which is a car we rely on heavily for R's work and for an alternative to the Ford Expedition, which is, of course, a gas guzzler. So, we're tapped out money-wise but we really do need to get this surgery done for the poor boy somehow. 

Time to look around for something to sell, I guess (Not the kids! Shame on you!) and see how we can swing it. 

In a related story, Sirius' evaluation for kidney problems continues. The vet is convinced there is some sort of kidney damage, as evidenced by his extremely low specific gravity in the urine, even the first urine of the morning. She sent out his urine sample to some lab for more specific protein testing that she can't do, and maybe we'll find something. I'd certainly like to nip a problem in the bud, or at least mitigate further kidney damage with diet or something, since we don't want things to progress without us knowing about it, like they did with Major. Two dogs with kidney issues is very suspicious, and we just don't know what the association could be. 

This is a reminder to anyone considering a pet for the first time: they are expensive, and it is your responsibility to take care of them, just like human children. Big dogs like we have are even more expensive, since they eat more food, wear out giant dog beds quickly, their medications cost more, anesthesia for surgery costs more per pound, etc. 

That's why I must slap myself on the wrist every time I glance lovingly at the Tibetan Mastiff Rescue page on FB where they have puppies needing fostering. I would ADORE that - what a stunning breed - but I just can't swing it these days. Hopefully I'll be able to resist. We have loose plans to reserve a bullmastiff pup that will hopefully be whelped sometime around Thanksgiving, but we're waiting to see if the breeding is successful. 

Remain Calm but Bring the Dog in IMMEDIATELY...

The vet called late yesterday afternoon while I was making a grocery stop on my way home from work to give me lab results.

His thyroid is normal and his CBC is normal, but he was showing some elevated levels that indicated pancreatitis.  No worries, but she wanted me to bring him by in the "next 30 minutes" to get an additional blood test to rule out this serious ailment. 

In the words of our great president #43, George W. Bush, "Do Whut??" I was confused. When I think of pancreatitis, I think of humans and the dire illness and pain it causes. Sirius was fit as a fiddle! However, I was at a store only minutes from my home, and the vet's office is also only minutes from my home, so I collected him and brought him by. They whisked him back for a quick blood draw (he was "an angel" lol) and we waited. The blood test, CPLi, or canine pancreatic lipase immunoreactivity, came back negative. No pancreatitis for you, Sirius, but now we have a baseline and we can recheck his panels a couple of times a year and know if things slip into poor ranges.  

While we waited for the results in the empty corner lobby with windows all around, he spied one of the vet techs walking one of the dogs they have there for boarding or medical care, and he immediately went on point, staring, riveted at the dog across the parking lot. He is not to be distracted during times like this, and this is precisely the behavior that I'm trying to correct. You can call his name, make him sit, give him a treat, take his head and turn it away, etc. and he will not be shaken from his focus. I had to walk him to another area of the lobby and even then he's craning his neck and trying to get a look. 

What I need to do is to give him the reward he seeks and the satisfaction he gets from this behavior, because there is something rewarding to him, or some sort of stimulation he is looking for when he spies another dog, since he basically turns into a completely different animal and cannot be distracted. I need to train him to look to me for that reward instead. This is a natural dog training concept but it makes sense to me, though I'm no canine and the more I learn the more I realize I don't know about dogs. 

Onward and upward...

A Very Sirius Business

"I've got your "dog training" riiiiggghhht here...."

We got our (nearly) Great Dane, Sirius, from the Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue organization in late 2007, when we estimated Sirius to be about 9 months old. We figure him now to be 6, which is a good age for a Great Dane, but he's showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down, and we are sure he's mixed with something. 

Once we sent away for one of those canine DNA tests out of curiosity, and I'd have guessed Great Dane with either Doberman or pit bull, but it came back Great Dane and Rottweiler, about equal parts, and no other breeds. This really does not compute, but it was good enough for us. Does he look like a Rottie to you? Since then, I have read quite a bit about these tests, and if I send it away again to the same company I might get a different answer, and almost certainly will if I send away to a different company. That's okay - we are always being asked about his breed but we'll never really know for sure. 

We did not have to do much work with this dog when we got him, and now I realize this might have worked against us in the long run (the photo at the top is just for the ironic imagery, and is NOT the work of Sirius! Click on the text for the reference). He went right into a crate when we got him home from the rescue location about an hour away (I was a nervous wreck when I realized I never asked if he was crate trained! What if he wasn't? I rely on crates for dog training) and never had any accidents in the house. He got along with our bullmastiff wonderfully, and was a great addition to the house. He didn't do anything we didn't want, and if he did, one correction was enough to cure him forever. 

Over time, several years, he started to get more and more excitable when we would see other dogs out on walks. When we went to see him for the first time, he was not leash trained at all, and my husband was almost unable to hold him with a leash. I was ready to go home right then with no dog - it was a deal breaker for me. The rescue folks got out a Gentle Leader/Halti collar type device and that worked like a charm, and he was easy as pie to control. Whew! A very close call. 

Once on a walk he was dancing around in excitement about a dog he saw on leash and he shook his head just right and got out of the head collar. Another time he was able to bite right through it, like he had used scissors, while he was in the car on our way somewhere. I decided to switch to a choke chain, which is what I've always used with our bullmastiffs, enabling me to give short "corrections" that keep the dog under control; this is important with a 150 pound bully breed for sure, and has worked very well for me, so I figured it would work on this giant dog too. 

Well, work it did, but, unbeknownst to me, I was conditioning him to get more and more excited and upset at the sight of other dogs, since his behavior would be corrected with pain and my displeasure. At some point he was impossible to take out without his excitement level turning him almost "red zone" before we got out the door. He gets himself worked up in anticipation of just about anything.

In the house, this dog is the model citizen - probably the best behaved dog I've ever known. He does not counter surf (though with his height he could do so easily), does not take food from children, does not take food from the coffee table (I would not blame him for that, but we've come home from being gone and a sandwich was left by one of the kids on the coffee table, untouched). He does not get up on the sofa unless invited, and NEVER has used the sofa in our absence - he seems to have no desire to be on the sofa unless one of us is there too. You can call his name or simply snap your fingers and point, and he'll go lay down on his bed. I can stop him on a dime in the house. 

However, leaving the house became another story altogether. There were more than one instance where he was dancing and stepping on my feet, causing me to fall down at the sight of another dog, and one of the last times I took him out he reacted very badly to another dog that nipped at him as he was being walked by - Sirius was labeled the "bad dog" and I took him home. It used to be that we could take him to festivals and events where there would be a lot of dogs, "flooding" him with so many other dogs that he could not concentrate on one in particular, but that was no longer the case, and we had to leave him behind. 

There was also an incident where we were walking down the street and a very small stray dog (loose dogs are very rare in my neighborhood) that was chasing us, barking and trying to nip at his face, and me unable to get us away, since that dog was loose and was running alongside us, determined to engage with Sirius, a 130-pound dog versus a 12-pound dog. Sirius bent down and picked up this little thing, shook it, and tossed it down. It got up and ran under a car, and fortunately I saw it several weeks later, apparently unharmed, but that was a big scare and alarmed me badly. If he had killed that dog, which he could have easily done, he would have been labeled a vicious animal and I'd have to muzzle him in public. It was not his fault, actually, and I don't really blame him, the little dog was biting at his face and would not leave him alone. 

Since then I've taken him out only to vet visits, and that is such a shame, and not fair to him. I tried a variety of methods to train him, but none of them had any lasting results. They'd work a time or two, but then he'd ignore them - excitement was the problem, and my own impatience was not helping. 

We recently lost our 3rd bullmastiff, Major, to a very sudden and terrible kidney failure (see prior post) and we now felt it was a good time to really focus on helping Sirius become a better dog in public, and have a more fulfilling life, able to go with us on our many outings to dog-friendly locations, as well as hiking and camping. I hate that it took the loss of Major to get me to take more decisive action, but it is hard to really focus and direct specific training when there is another dog in your way trying to get the treat or distract the student. No excuse, but it is the truth. Plus, we could take Major  absolutely anywhere and it was easy enough just to grab the "good dog" and leave the "bad dog" at home. *Sigh* Live and learn.

We hired a trainer, Janet Velenovsky, and have learned a lot since consulting with her. I knew that I had caused Sirius' problems, but I was not completely sure how. We now realize that Sirius is very "soft," and needs to be handled differently than we are accustomed to handling our dogs, after 20 years of owning stubborn and independent bully breeds, three bullmastiffs and one bulldog mix. You can't bully or be forceful with Sirius, as he gets confused and overreacts, and then tries to mitigate the "punishment" by trying to anticipate what you want, then you don't want that, and he gets confused and overstimulated. I needed to be able to control my dog, who could very easily overpower me and get away, being such a large dog, but the choke chain, then the prong collar, were doing nothing but aggravating him, and making him more anxious about leaving the house. If people can control 1000-pound horses with a head collar, then why not a 130-pound dog? He got out of the head collar once, but it was probably not fitted properly and I needed some handling lessons for myself. 

He needs to learn to focus on ME, or my husband, or whomever has the leash, and not be distracted by dogs approaching on walks. We needed to train him to face us on command, and over time he'd learn to trust us on leash. 

This training had mixed results, and I've had to backtrack a bit - this is why I say that maybe we should have done some basic training with him when we got him. We didn't think he needed any training, since he seemed trained already, but the simple routine of performing a command and receiving a treat is now enough to send him over the edge with excitement. Again, the excitement. He began to lunge and bite my hand with the treat in it, anticipating when he'd get it, and ignoring the exercise. Keep in mind that normally a treat does not send him over the edge - he will take his treat and go on about his business. However, this training exercise somehow made him anticipate getting the treat, and he loses his composure. 

Now we had to backtrack, as I mentioned, and teach him HOW to take a treat, and what is acceptable. After that, we start working on his training of specific behaviors. This is a slow process, but I will learn some patience in the process, no doubt. 

In the meantime, I have also purchased a head collar, a Halti this time (the first was a Gentle Leader) and we've been using it in the yard. It is working very well, and I think it fits his head in a way that will make him unable to shake it off. It also comes with a little snap strap that you attach to their regular collar, so in the introductory phase if they shake it off you'll still be attached to their collar so you can get hold of the dog. This snap is not strong enough to hold him, but it will buy me a second or two to grab the collar. 

I have also purchased a spray can of citronella, designed to be used on dogs, so if a stray dog approaches us with aggression I can spray towards the dog and chase it off with the strong and unpleasant odor that is very powerful in a dog's sensitive nose. Plus, if it gets on me or Sirius it won't be as much of a problem as pepper spray blow-back can be. That will give me extra confidence when I've got him out in public, since I won't worry about a loose dog putting me and my reactive dog in a bad situation. Janet recommended this to me and I think it is a great idea. 

He did very well today, just on a short walk down the street a few blocks and back, and we even saw a cat under our front bushes, darting out in front of us, and he was not too excited by that, and we went on our way. I'm not going to get too optimistic too soon, since it will take a lot of time to get him deconditioned, with so many years of being that way, but I do think we can make this work. I can't be yanking on his collar and issuing "NO" commands left and right; I have to treat him differently and teach him a Pavlovian response to a word or term, like "come to front," "this way!" or, my favorite, "ten hut!"  If we can get this done in the house and yard, with few distractions, to the point where it is 100%, then we'll start working with distractions, and little by little we'll get him there. I have volunteers in the wings, ready to walk their stable dogs past my house, or walk ahead of us down the street, or come up behind us on the street, etc., when the time is right. 

He is an old dog for the breed, technically, but he's as fit and agile as the day we got him, though he's getting a little gray around the muzzle. He can learn new tricks!

Incidentally, and not to be overlooked, is that I have taken him to a new vet, recommended by Janet, and she discovered an infected anal gland (we had no idea!) and is also running a complete blood panel, including thyroid, to be sure there are no health issues that could be contributing to his behavior problems. This is a very important part of dog training. Aches and pains, hormone or other chemical imbalances can definitely cause unwanted behaviors that have nothing to do with obedience, and sometimes (often in big dogs, especially) they don't let you know that they're hurting.