Rabitat

Today I had another fun-filled morning with rabbits, but this time I was at The Bunny House (as opposed to Rescue Village). Most of the rabbits at The Bunny House are healthy and don't have EC. Theresa, the woman who volunteered with me at Piggy Paradise yesterday ended up being at The Bunny House this morning. There was also another volunteer and another intern, Ryan, there. We started the morning by feeding the bunnies pellets. Then it was time for cleaning. Each rabbit enclosure has an inside and outside portion. Theresa and I cleaned the insides while Ryan and the other volunteer cleaned the outsides. This basically involved taking out their food bowl, pouring out their water bowl and cleaning/refilling it, taking all their toys out, taking their litterbox out and dumping the top layer and replacing it with hay, taking out the towels and blankets, sweeping up the hay and poop, mopping the floor, and then replacing everything. It sounds like a lot but once you get into the swing of things it's pretty easy. Theresa and I had a good system going too so it wasn't too bad. The cleaning took up most of the morning but when we were done we went with the caregiver, Michelle, to see Rabitat. Rabitat is a building that was built a long time ago that houses the overflow rabbits. There are 9 rabbits living their now. It's pretty cool inside and you can tell it's old, but it still works. Then we came back to The Bunny House and held some rabbits. They were super cute and incredibly soft. I held Kelso (his brother's name is named Hyde). He was so relaxed he fell asleep! It was a very enjoyable morning at The Bunny House.

This afternoon we had our first training session with the trainer Tamra. Sharkey really likes training, but he gets very anxious and excited when there are other dogs around, so he was quite vocal during the session. There wasn't too much we went over this session, but there will be in the coming sessions. I'm going to work with Sharkey a lot on focus and calming behavior. I hope this will help him out quite a bit on the anxiety that I've noticed.

After training, a few other interns and I sat in on Tamra's assessments. Dogs get assessed when they first come to The Sanctuary, along with [usually] every six months or so. Also, if a dog is purple collar/red collar and they want to move them to green collar/purple collar, they must assess them beforehand, specifically going over the issues that made them purple/red collar in the first place. It was really, really interesting to watch and I learned a lot from watching the dogs' body language. The first dog we assessed was a German Shorthaired Pointer named Wayne. His facial expression never changed so it was really hard to read him. The next dog was Zeke. Zeke made me very sad. He is 12 years old and was surrendered by his family. It's always sad to see a dog surrendered, but it's even sadder when it's an older dog. You know they've had a family for their whole lives and now they're in a completely different environment. It was also sad because it seemed like Zeke had a lot of pain in his hips. He wouldn't stand for very long and you could tell it was difficult for him to get up and lay down. Zeke came in over weight, which can't be good for his hips so hopefully with some weight loss and physical therapy it won't be as bad for him. The last dog was Diesel and Diesel was on our project dog list until they thought he had kennel cough and wouldn't be able to participate in the training class with other dogs. He came from a hoarding situation in Spindletop, Texas in which an animal rescue went horribly wrong. In a two story house they ended up with 80 pit bulls who all lived in crates. Before that, Diesel's owner cropped his ears. With scissors. Usually when owner's take it into their own hands to crop a dogs ears they do it without pain medication. So Diesel has definitely been through a lot in his life but he is still the most friendly and loving dog.