Two more days left :(

Apologies for my lack of posting, but I've been a busy girl!

Monday I started my day out at Old Friends. They were super busy, which meant I was also super busy. I separated all of the dogs for breakfast, helped with volunteers, and walked some dogs. Remember Eve, the dog who I got to watch use her new cart for the first time? She has been doing FABULOUSLY! In the week and a half she's had it, she has gotten much, much stronger. I saw her standing. Eve standing. On her own. For at least 5 seconds! It was awesome. I also got to watch her go for a walk using her cart with her friend Dumpling. I have a video, but I'm having issues uploading it so hopefully figure it out. In the meantime, here is Eve and Dumpling playing after the walk.

I spent the afternoon up at Rescue Village with the rabbits. I did some cleaning, helped bond some bunnies, and other odds and ends of things, including making Angel Mush. Angel Mush is a food they make for rabbits that need to gain weight or need some incentive to eat, and the rabbits absolutely love it! It has rabbit pellets, pumpkin, water, oat flour, ensure, and V8. Weird combination, I know, but it works!

Monday night I finished up my enrichment poster so I could take it in to the Fairway Tuesday. I will say now that I have gotten many compliments on it! The staff there have started showing it to their daily tours and apparently there is a text message circulating the caregivers at Best Friends about it, which is great. Enrichment is a nice additive to the lives of animals and I hope more areas end up finding some kind of schedule that works for them.

Tuesday morning was my Sharkey time and what a great time it was. I started out by taking him for a walk at Angel's Overlook. It is very pretty there. Our assignment for this week's training class is to teach your project dog a trick and present it to the class on Thursday. The trick I wanted to teach Sharkey was to spin and then do a play bow after, but that may have been too ambitious with only one day of training with him until Thursday.
I ended up taking Sharkey into a large bathroom at DogTown headquarters to work on training with him. He gets too distracted working outside; the same goes for Tara's Run, so the bathroom was the prefect place - smaller, quiet, and no distractions. He did awesome with spin, but I couldn't get the play bow down, so we're going to stick with spin. We also worked on some leave-its, since he needs a lot of impulse control work.

I took Sharkey back and Kersten, one of the team leaders, was at Old Friends. She had a special project for me; she's been fostering a puppy that was found on the streets and he now has severe separation anxiety with her. She asked me to help crate train him and just kind of hang out with him. Let me just say, Bandit is incredibly adorable. He has GIGANTIC ears and is missing one eye. I ended up getting him into a crate and reading to him. He was so quiet! However, as soon as Kersten walked back into the kitchen where I was with him, and then left, he started SCREAMING! It was so shrill and sounded nothing like a dog! He's going to need some work, but I really hope he'll be able to get over his anxiety.

Tuesday afternoon I spent time at the Fairway. All of the chores and dog walking was done for the day. We started getting volunteers to work with the dogs on some enrichment stuff :) I took Raisin for an outing. She was so excited to see me when I first got in her run she ALMOST came all the way up to me (which I know seems like uhhh the dog won't come up to you?! but she's very, very shy and a very special case). I got her leash and then she did come up to me...but so did her three other runmates. Those guys are crazy! They're all black labs with a lot of energy and Raisin is this shy girl. It only took me about five minutes to get Raisin to the point that she was comfortable with me leashing her, which is a HUGE improvement. Once we got outside, she would not get in the car. One of the caregivers, Chris, had to come out and pick her up. She really wasn't bad in the car though. We went to Angel's Overlook for a nice walk. I sat with her in the sand and she sat or laid down and let me pet her for quite a while, although she wasn't completely comfortable the whole time. She got into the car just fine for our ride back. That was the bulk of working with Raisin Tuesday, but every now and then I'd go into her run and call her name and she would come right up to me and lick my hand every time, which is completely awesome.

I worked with some other shy dogs Tuesday like Ashley (who has finally stopped barking at me continuously and will come up and lick my hand and let me pet her), and Zeb, who barks at you for a while and then kind of accepts you after.

After work Tuesday, I went out with Shauna, Chris, and Sam, who is one of the four month interns. I had a great time and will really miss working with Shauna and Chris. They're just both such great people.

Percie

Today was another great day, of course. I spent ALL DAY in Deja Lodges. I didn't get to do too much behavioral work because Josh was off today, but I did do some. Liz was the only caregiver there, so we were pretty busy. I walked eight dogs this morning - Ebony, Pulgas, Scratch, Beauregard, Percie, Dreezle, Celine, and Ava -  all of which were green collar or purple collar because interns can't go in with red collar dogs. This is a large part of why the Lodges are so busy - no one other than staff can interact with red dogs. That means they are the only ones that can clean their runs, feed them, water them, walk them, and medicate them. I worked on mouthiness with Percie. I've mentioned Percie before; he was a street dog from Mexico that has no idea how to interact with people. He really likes people; he just doesn't know what to do, hence his mouthiness. Verbal corrections don't do much, but a verbal correction and taking your attention completely away from him seemed to do the trick; his mouthiness had reduced greatly after our session.

This afternoon I watched Huck and Liz work with Tiki on some handling issues. He does not like his paws or tail touched. It was super interesting.

Then I cleaned out a lodge, did some dishes, and helped Liz with handing out medications to the dogs I could.

I'm very sad today was my last day in the Lodges. The caregivers rock and the dogs are incredible. There is so much learning going on there, with people and dogs alike, and I loved every minute of it. I'm also definitely going to miss Ebony, the kitchen dog. She is beautiful, silly, and so smart.










Since today is Wednesday, it means training at the dog park in town. Since it was the last day I was able to attend, I stayed for both hour sessions. Even with the most basic training, I'm constantly learning new approaches to familiar ideas. I've really enjoyed being able to go to the sessions I've gone to. I'm also going to miss the trainers - the things I have learned from each of them are invaluable.


I have two days left of my internship and I'm really not ready for it to end. I thought this internship would be mostly connecting with animals, but I didn't include humans in that and I really should have.