Mike’s Doghouse

Mike is doing great with training. There are only a few issues such as Loose Leash Walking but even that is getting better. We started Basic Manners II classes last week (then had to skip the second class last night). That class is going to be quite intensive. I’m going to have to do most of it from my chair which will be interesting.

Mike’s DOWN is great! His SIT is solid although on a slick floor, or if we remain in one place too long, he will slide down. His WAIT is good but the length of the WAIT is short. He will remain still most of the time while I move around him but he will almost always get up when I move behind him. His RECALL is excellent, too. I use two different terms for RECALL. One is his name repeated in a friendly, playful, high pitched voice (Mikeymikeymikeymikey!). The other is the usual ‘Mike, Come’ and is done in a deeper, more authoritative voice. He responds to both the same. He comes charging from wherever he was, full speed.

I’ve started switching away from the clicker and more to a voice cue (Yes!). When I use the chair, it is too difficult to maneuver the chair, hold his leash, watch where I am going, and click the clicker. He responds just fine to Yes! as long as I have a treat. He’s not too sure about it if there’s no treat involved. He is very food motivated but I think he will not be too difficult to wean away from that. But I also know I will have to keep treats with me at all times for quite a while.

The one improvement I’ve seen is he is calming down in new situations. I can put him in a DOWN and he will stay there. He’s even flopped over onto his side if I remain in one place long enough. We will be going to different places and getting him used to being calm while at my side. I will have to restrict him getting pets. With Joella, it didn’t interfere with her learning or working. But with Mike, I think it will. I think with him, wearing the cape is going to be a big signal for him. Jo is the same no matter where she is (especially once she matured). But Mike will need that cape to signal it is working time vs “the world loves me and must pet me” time.

I took Mike to the vet today. Yesterday, while we were gone, he did something to his back right leg. He wasn’t bearing any weight on it at first, then slowly was using it at times, mostly when standing still. He was uncomfortable but we were certain it wasn’t a break. He let me manipulate the foot and ankle/hock but wasn’t thrilled when I extended his hip. This morning he was bearing weight on it almost all the time but he walked like he was sitting on the saddle too long. So off to the vet we went.

He let Dr. K manipulate the hip although he didn’t like it. He didn’t cry out so we both agreed it wasn’t a break (such as a “green stick” fracture). She feels it might be a soft tissue (muscle/tendon) injury. We also decided it was time to neuter him so next Thursday (7th) he will get that done finally. While he is out, they’ll do x-rays on his hips and that knee. He is too young to diagnose hip dysplasia but there is a slight chance there may be something else structurally wrong. The chance is very slight but since this is the third or so time he has injured that same leg, we are doing the x-rays just to make sure. If nothing else, we have a baseline set of images for later.

Mike and I will have to miss the second class of Basic Manners II tonight, dangit.

Oh, and just so you don’t think I was mean for not taking him to the emergency clinic last night: if a dog will put weight on a leg, it usually isn’t broken. Sometimes they will for a greenstick fracture, but not often. When we first saw he wasn’t bearing weight at all, we touched him all over and watched him walk while discussing the time and where we could take him. He began putting weight on the leg when standing still and we decided to wait and see. The emergency clinic here is ghastly expensive and I knew I could at the worst drop Mike off this morning for our vet to check when they could. We examined him later again after everything had calmed down. Again, we felt he had pulled a muscle or sprained something. If he had been walking fine this morning, I probably wouldn’t have taken him in but with that odd, saddle sore like walk he had, we decided it would be best to have him checked.

Mike is making the switch from Puppy Food to Big Boy Food. Now that he is (ack!) almost 8 mos, it was time to put him on adult food. He was eating Wellness Just For Puppy and as soon as that bag is empty, he’ll start Wellness Super 5 Mix adult. Our other dogs eat Taste of the Wild. (I discussed protein amounts in another post)

I read a wonderfully well written blog by a vet. Dolittler is wonderful in that it is candid, honest, and revealing both personally and professionally. Sometimes the posts are painful (euthanasia) other times they are a hoot (hen turned out to be a rooster). Today’s post, titled Counting calories in fat dog weight loss and the role of “intelligence”, brings up this delicate subject of calories and pets. We humans don’t often consider calories when it comes to our pets. We gleefully dole out the kibble and assume it is all well and good. Some of us read the labels to find out how much to feed, most don’t.

I admit it: We’ve never paid much attention to the calories. One, they are hard to find on the bags. Two, if a dog gets chunky, we feed less until it’s not so chunky, then maintain that feeding amount. This means one dog will get two full scoops, another may get one and another scoop with a wee bit off the top (yeah, we are oh so precision oriented). Jake, our Damnation Dalmatian, had a big weight problem. She could visibly gain weight just from one treat too many that week. It took us a while to figure out her base amount of food then could add or subtract from that depending on what else was going on. We also raise everyone’s food amount in the summer (more active) and lower it in the winter (slug-o-rama). If Lorna and Sam are going on a hike, we feed him a little more at both meals and she takes high quality treats along.

But how much calories does a dog need? Dolittler gives the following equation (bolding of text is my doing):

Base calories/day (resting energy requirement) =
30 x (your dog’s weight in kg) + 70

Example: So if you have a 10 kg (22 pound) dog, he needs to eat 370 calories a day.

Since this is based on adult dogs, I’ll use Joella as my example. Jo is about 80 lbs. Using my little converter program, that’s equal to 36.28739 kg. Then, using my little calculator program, that means she needs about 1159 calories per day.

But then it gets a little more complicated. That’s because the “resting energy requirement” is only a measure of the amount of energy (in calories) he needs to keep his basic functions going comfortably. So if he’s a busy dog who runs around a lot in your big yard, he’ll need a lot more. And if he’s a neutered couch potato who’s seriously obese he may need no more than his basic bodily functions require to actually lose some weight.

Joella’s not overly active but she’s not a slug either. I went and got out the empty bags (we stuff them into one then take it out when that bag is full) and made notes of the amounts to feed and the calories.

Jo’s weight tends to waver between 78 and 83 so we’ll go by the “60 – 80 lbs” recommendations. She gets two meals a day, 3 scoops each. Our scoop is .5 cup so she gets 3 cups a day. She’s getting the low end of the required amount (Taste of the Wild’s High Prairie = 1110) which comes in just under the calculated amount for her resting energy requirement. Not bad! Since she is recovering from her leg surgery and will be a slug-puppy for a few weeks, I now know I don’t need to cut back on her food any to keep her weight steady. I also know that we’ll need to watch her treat intake during this.

Back to Mike. I’m going to guess he is about 45 lbs which is 20.41166 kg. Times that by 30 and add 70 and he should be getting about 682 calories per day IF he were an adult. The Wellness Adult says to add 25% for pups which puts it at about the right amount using Dolittler’s equation but still low going by their feeding chart of the puppy food. What this tells me is that when we do the switch, we’ll need to make sure he is getting enough calories. Currently, he’s sleek, maybe a little on the thin side, but with growing full breed pups, that can change at any given moment. On the surface, the Wellness Adult food has a weird calorie amount. But using Joella again, her 3 cups is on the upper end of the amount for her weight group so it evens out.

If you’ve followed along, you know that Mike is to be trained to be a Service Dog. He is to “replace” Joella, my current SD who is 8.5 yrs old. Joella is having some difficulty with her back legs and Tuesday (April 21st) she will be having surgery on one of her ankles.

Since Joella will be needing all of my mental attention, Mike’s SD training is on hold for a few weeks. It is Spring and he is happy to be outside playing right now so it will all work out. Starting over won’t bother either of us in the least. He and I start Basic Manners II the day we bring Jo home so we’ll still be working on that.

We’re thrilled Joella won’t be needing the more extensive knee surgery we all thought she’d have. We were concerned we’d not be able to keep Mike calm around her. He likes to sit on Jo which would not have been a good idea. Even with this surgery, we’ll still be keeping him quiet, but not as much as with the other surgery. It may be a good chance to work on SPOT outside of the kitchen, eh?

It is a harsh reality but it is something that is necessary, and, for some dogs, it is vital.

The Nothing in Life Is Free (NILIF) principal is simple: the dog gets nothing without first doing something to earn it. Some dog trainers say that toys should never be left laying around. That they should be taken up whenever a dog is not playing with it. When the dog is doing something you want to encourage, it gets the paycheck of getting a toy. If a dog has all the food it wants (free-feeding) all the toys it wants, why should it listen to you? All you do is place demands. Take up the toys, switch to two meals a day, and start placing tasks before a toy or meal is given, and the dog figures out what is going on.

Some say this is the positive reinforcements way of dealing with the “Alpha Dog” theory. I believe this is true. We can’t speak dog so doing posturing and positioning like a dog would do isn’t really the same. But, by teaching the dog that everything good comes from you, that makes you the leader.

Mike has been taught to sit before he gets his meal. He also has a set place he is to sit and remain, even when the other dogs are moving about, he is to remain there. Even when the food is put down, he cannot have it until he is released. We don’t have many toys down for him because Sam tends to de-stuff everything. We take up the high-value things like the chew toys. Mike gets these when he goes into his crate. He enjoys them more because, to him, they are something new and special. I have a toy we use as the jackpot toy during and after training sessions. He only gets to play with the toy then. I tried using toys he considered cool at home and he could care less when at dog class. So I got something new that had all his fave things on it: a ball that squeaked, a rope to tug/gnaw, and flappy things to grab. I know that if I were to let him have this toy at home, he’d not care for it anymore during training.

I had learned of this method during the classes Mike and I took for Puppy Class and Basic Manners I. I also read about it at the Rottweiler.net forum. I like how it works, how it puts the human in charge without any wrestling or other weird human-trying-to-be-dog stuff.

Imagine that you are in France. You cannot speak French and everyone around you cannot speak English. So they teach you some phrases so they can interact with you on a very basic level. Now, let’s say there’s a French word for something important that sounds an awful lot like something else important in French. Each time either of those two words are used, you have to pause and try to figure out which of the two applies.

I’m betting that is how our dogs feel. It is why I work hard to not have two dogs at the same time with similar names. We once had a cat named Max and a dog named Maggie. Call either one of them and they both would look at me trying to figure out which one of them was being called. We also once had a dog named Zeus and for several months, we babysat a dog named Drew. Oh, now that was fun!

I also try to not have command/cue words that sound the same. I also tend to use more than one word once the dog understand what the word means. OFF morphs into “get your fuzzy butt off the bed”.

Sometimes words are used that sound too much like words that aren’t commands. The best example is one given at the first dog class. Many people use FREE as the release command. The instructor had been either on a Search and Rescue exercise or a big hike, I can’t remember which. Anyway, they line all these well-behaved dogs up together for a group photo. They are all doing a wonderful SIT and are focused. The instructor, who was taking the photo, said “Okay, one….two…three!”

Can you guess what happened when she said “three”? If you guessed the dogs all broke their sit and went charging about in play, you were right! It was total chaos as humans were laughing, dogs were playing, and the instructor/photographer was going “What happened?”

Good question. I’d done some research earlier. The rule of thumb is that what they weigh at 6 mos is half what they’ll way as an adult. If that holds true, then Mike will be about 80lbs or so.

He hasn’t added any adult bulk. He’s tall, almost as tall as Joella and Sam now. But he is thin and wiry. The last time he was at the vet’s, he barely reached 40lbs. We look at him sometimes and wonder if he is every going to add muscle mass and bulk or will he be a small dog after all.

Here’s Jo and Mike back in mid January:

And here they are from the other evening:

He is almost as tall and almost as long as she is but really does not have that bulk of an adult rottweiler. However, I went to look through Jo’s vet record and saw that in January, 2002, at just 1yr and 19wks old, she was just under 70 lbs. She is about 82lbs now at 8yrs old and had a maximum weight of 90lbs in 2005 when she was 4.5 yrs old. Going by this, we can assume that Mike is not going to start really filling out until he is at least a year. That is typical of Rottweilers and other large breeds. They don’t reach their true adult size until two, sometimes three years of age.

NOTE: This review is about seat belts from USA K9 Outfitters. There is a similarly named company in the same town called Champion Canine Designs (ChampK-9). The websites look almost the same in every way. However, ChampK-9 is not filling orders, not answering emails, not answering the phone, and all phone answering machines are full. The legitimate place is usak9outfitters.com. If anyone has had a bad experience with ChampK-9, I strongly urge you to file a complaint via the Better Business Bureau.

I’ve tried several types of canine seat belts over the years. The simplest was a heavy duty short lead/tab that hooked to a regular harness on one end and had the seat belt threaded through the other. Another was the Four Paws padded harness which was decent enough. Or so I thought.

But I’ve learned over the years that there is a lot that happens during a collision and that the vast majority of canine seat belts just will not work. It is all about where the load stress is during an impact. These stress points must be reinforced so they do not come loose. The problem with a lot of the older seat belts for dogs is that they relied on regular harness stitching and plastic buckles at the stress points. As every dog owner knows, those plastic buckles break at the worst times and during a crash they were sure to.

Another main problem with many dog seat belts is that the human felt they needed an engineering degree to get the harness on properly. Some look simple enough but flunk this test while trying to buckle in a squirming dog eager to get going. The tab I have came with instructions that said to put it on the dog’s collar! Right, if you want his neck snapped! I wrote a series of articles (for EDS Today) about Service Dogs and one of the articles was about vehicle safety.

I recently bought the Champion Canine Seat Belt System from USA K9 Outfitters. I chose them after reading several online reviews. (the best resource for dog seat belts is over at The Agile Pooch.) I got three systems plus a “puppy” harness and three extra restraint straps to put in Lorna’s wagon.

PROS: these things are heavy duty stuff! They are built tough out of heavy strap material. There are a lot of sizes available, even for huge breeds. Easy enough to put on but does take practice (we’ve found it best to put on indoors first then take the rowdy pups out to the truck). The harness slides around, allowing the dog to move without the stress points being compromised. The “system” includes the harness and the restraint strap.

Did I mention it is heavy duty? There are two rings where the restraint strap attaches. These things are so big that a regular leash snap won’t hold them both. This harness makes me think of a climbing harness, it is that tough feeling and looking. The harness attaches to a restraint strap that weighs almost as much as the harness itself! Again, big strong hardware on tough material. The other end of the restraint strap is attached to the vehicle in a variety of ways. We used the “quick link” to attach to the lap portion of the back seat belts. The plastic buckles are huge (but are not stress points). All of the hardware is heavy duty almost to the point of overkill. But should the point of a safety device.

CONS: The harness is heavy and putting it on does take some practice. The weight of the harness means you can’t drape the first half over the dog while getting the other leg through. Unlike other harnesses where it slips over the dog’s head then the rest is brought up and clipped together at the chest, this harness is designed so that each leg must be put through the harness and then the clips come together at the top. We’ve gotten better at it and with more practice, we’ll have no further trouble. The fact that the harness slides around may be good in the vehicle but is a pain in the butt out of the it. I need to tighten the harness more to see if that keeps the sliding to a minimal.

The restraint straps come with a “bull snap” clip to attach to the harness. The design of this snap was difficult for me to use to the point I was either going to return them or modify them. (see below for the solution)

Bottom Line: Wow. This is an excellent product from a great company. They’ve put a lot into the design. The cost ($45) is well worth it. Other quality seat belts cost about the same. The entire system is well designed with no weak link. In case of an accident, Mike will be safe. He may slam into the front seat of the truck, but he won’t be ejected. Nor will he get loose and run off.

I emailed the company to ask what weight strength of climbing carabiner I could use. Just a few hours later, I got a reply. They have a second kind of bull snap and were putting three restraint straps together for me! I got them just a few days later and returned the three I had original purchased. This more user-friendly snap is much easier to use. A comparison photo of the two snaps is over in the reviews photo album.

The seat belt system is sold by USA K9 Outfitters. They have the Champion System with sizes from 11″ to 42″ chests (<15lb to 100+ lb) and the Survivor System for 30″ – 52″ chests (80lb to 220+lb). You can get just the harness, just the restraint strap, and several other auto/truck stuff like seat covers and barriers. The “puppy” harness is where you get the seat belt system in the size the dog will be as an adult then you get a smaller harness (at a discounted price!) the dog is now. They also have a short article on why a dog should be restrained while in a moving vehicle.

The “put the bone on the nose” trick didn’t work. It may someday but neither of us (me and Mike) are interested in pursuing it. So what we will work on is “Where’s your tail?” Basically, it is getting him to go in a circle. He’ll do this already. I need to fine tune it some and tack on the cue. I think this will be funny as heck since he has a nub.

Teaching Joella her main trick was easy since all I had to do was add a cue to something she already did. She does a “Dead bug” where she lays on her back. She sleeps in that position a lot, too. So all I had to do was say “Do the Dead Bug” and she’d roll over. Mike doesn’t have anything he does like that. I’ve been watching him, trying to come up with something but, nope. The only thing he does really well is when he is focused and sitting, he sits so far upright, it looks as if you could knock him backwards by touching his nose. Of course, you can’t, but that’s how upright he sits. I looked at that from all angles and couldn’t come up with something to make it into. Basically, its a SIT and nothing more.

Meanwhile, Mike knows DOWN finally. We are working on OFF. He’ll do a WAIT for a long time. He put himself in his SPOT the other day. I praised like mad but his attention was on his food bowl up on the counter. House training is still going. He came to me tonight (Lorna must’ve forgotten to latch his crate). I petted him and finished what I was doing but by then it was too late. He’d made a mess in the kitchen. I let him out the back door while I cleaned it up. He did tell me, though. I thought maybe he was just saying “My door was unlatched!” but now I know better. He’ll go into his crate when Lorna opens the gate to the bedroom and says “Time for bed”. If he is full of himself, he’ll still be running around but if he is ready, he goes right into his box. We still have the small crate in the bedroom for him and the Big Boy Box in the living room. That’s where he stays when we go out.

I also just updated the command/cue list. It is in a spreadsheet in two different formats:

Commands.ods (OpenOffice spreadsheet)
Commands-xls.xls (Microsoft Excel)

After about 2 days of brain frying, I think the problem has been solved. You can read about it over at Thought Patterns in an article aptly named “Oy! What happened?“.