A Dog at Home

It's Saturday morning and it's quiet.  Iain isn't up yet and Tom has headed off to Lake Allatoona for the day.  I just got back from walking the dog.  it's a lot easier than it used to be.  Leonard has gone from being so agitated on a leash that we were afraid he would be injured to being the kind of dog that strolls on a leash and does lots of sniffing but not a lot of tugging.  He still sometimes gets agitated when he sees people and other dogs -- especially people who are running -- but this doesn't seem to be aggression.  He actually does fine around most dogs -- he has uneventfully been introduced to several of the dogs on the street -- and is fine with strangers walking up and petting him, even when I tell them to move slowly and they don't.  But he really does get worked up when he sees people running or children playing.

The dramatic transformation of Leonard from terrified and agitated to mostly calm started with using the harness instead of the collar (thank you for that advice, Dr. Fiorillo), and I'm sure the fluoxetine has also helped (that's generic for Prozac, and thank you for that too, Dr. Fiorillo).  And it's been a couple of months now, and I'm sure that the passage of time has also helped.  He's mostly settled down and is acting like a pretty normal dog, except for really not wanting to go into the back yard.  He's still on exercise restriction because of the heartworm treatment, so we haven't pushed that, but once he's not we'll have to figure out how to get him back there enough that he'll get used to it.  He is wonderful at retrieving a ball, and we haven't been doing that either, because of the exercise restriction.  So that's something left to work on.

But why the excitement when he sees people running, or children in the church parking lot playing baseball?  He no longer is afraid of airplanes overhead or bags of yard waste; this, along with his aversion to going into the back yard, is pretty much all that is left in the category of Leonard's inexplicable behaviors.  We did get a DNA test on him to try to ascertain his non-Labrador retriever ancestry.  According to Mars Veterinary's Wisdom Panel, he's a Labrador retriever-Australian shepherd mix.  (This figure makes it looks like he might be a purebreed Lab, or equally likely to be a Tibetan mastiff-Lab mix, but I don't think that's right, and it's not how Mars Veterinary interpreted it.)

I don't know much about Australian shepherds, but what I have learned since we got this result is that they are herding dogs (that's the "shepherd" part), and so his watchfulness may not be nervousness but just his nature.  And maybe that's why when he sees people running, especially children, he really wants to go after them.  They are loose, and they need to be herded up.  

Last night when I was walking him we saw a large possum crossing the street.  He really wanted to go after it.  I didn't let him, as I didn't think it would likely end well for either Leonard or the possum, but you never know.