Saturday, September 09, 2006

Week 3

We went to see Dr. Daigle over at the Poulsbo Marina vet clinic yesterday--Kodos is doing fine. He had another parvo/distemper shot, a worming & we got hooked up w/some Advantage anti-flea stuff for all the pets in the household. The K-man weighs 25.2 lbs or so (he was pretty wiggly on the scale, so that's probably +/- a pound or so). I actually forgot to ask about changing the feeding regimen, but as the vet seemed happy w/his weight, I'm inclined to stay the course (roughly 3 meals of 1-cup kibble & 1 tbsp canned dog food). He was a big hit at the clinic, naturally. At the vet's recommendation, we're going to wait to microchip him until he goes for neutering (anytime before 4.5 months, if I recall correctly). Next appt. is in a month, for another p/d shot & something involving a stool sample.

The mornings this week have been a bit tough on Laurel & the girls--school started on Weds, which means they're much more rushed & there was much less attention for Kodos (I'm off to work before they get up 4x/week, so I'm no help). He barked & carried on quite a bit--got into a bit of a frenzy. Things were much better on Thursday & then yesterday were just fine, as I was home. We're strategizing how to keep him occupied & reasonably calm on school mornings. I'm thinking of giving him his breakfast in several kongs, to spread it out over time & keep him busy. Hopefully that'll be the ticket--if not, we'll try something else.

Here's a pic I just took of him. Awfully photogenic, don't you think? ;-)

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Life with Kodos

Well, it's 2 weeks today that we've had Kodos, aka the K-man, aka K-Rock aka Special K. He's fitting in just fine. I had some wrong ideas about how easy the housetraining would be, and how quickly he would willingly go on leashed walks with me, but I think we've reached an understanding now.

The housetraining is going pretty well. We're crate-training, and I think the crate we have him in is officially too big for him (that is, he could probably go potty in one corner & be able to get far enough away from it to be happy. But he (cross fingers) hasn't done so yet, and after 2 weeks, I'm inclined to trust that he won't. We have the crate downstairs in the kitchen, and that's working well for us. I've been getting up twice a night (and yes it's me doing it, even on commute days) but am going to try and get that down to once/night soon. Actually, given the nice weather we've been having, Kodos has been pretty happy to sleep outside on the deck. That's pretty sweet, until one of the cats decides s/he wants to go out, and they sit on the other side of the sliding glass door. Kodos noticed Suki doing that at about 3am this morning, which caused a bunch of barking. Now, we have neighbors w/dogs that bark (even very late sometimes) but I'd like to not bother them too much, so I pretty promptly went down there & we did an animal exchange (dog comes in, cat goes out). I tried to wait for a 2-second period of non-barking, so as not to encourage the barking. We'll see how well that works out.

So now I'm looking to get the other aspects of his training together--the big issue right now is biting. He is of course used to having siblings to bite, who will bite him back & yelp as appropriate. We humans definitely do the yelping, but we'd really like to be more than chew toys to the little critter.

I've been doing a lot of reading. First the Monks of New Skete's puppy book (which I later learned is really quite out of date (it was published in 1991), and their How To Be Your Dog's Best Friend (much more recent). One of my correspondents on the newf-l list recommended Ian Dunbar's Before & after getting your puppy : the positive approach to raising a happy, healthy, and well-behaved dog. That's looking good--hopefully we can make that work.

Here are a couple of short videos of Kodos--here he's just romping around a bit:



And here's how he reacted to our scooba. I thought it was funny how underwhelmed he was. At the end he gets up & starts barking--not at the scooba, but at our cat who appeared at the back door: