Dogs and Itchiness

Well lets see where to start eh? I have many many things to do today, working out being number one priority on my list because of my 20lb weight gain and my stiff c.p.  My size six is slowly becoming uncomfortable. :(   Okay now that I got that off of my mind.... well see I'm hoping that by the time that I'm done typing this I will feel more awake from the coffee, hence hoping the desire to work out will spring me.  I get very depressed and bitter and mean when i don't work out and well y'all I haven't worked out but once in the past six months. :(

Okay now on to the dogs.

We currently have three dogs in the house.  Guinness whom you all know by now or at least you know his story.  Snickers, who is our neighbors dog down the street and Samantha the new puppy. 

Our neighbor was getting a pool put in on the 19th of May so we were watching Snickers.  Snickers is an outside dog and our neighbor was and is worried about Snickers chewing up the pool pump etc.  I can see her worry.  Snickers chewed up her hose outside so there is a great possibility that she will in fact eat the pump etc. This would be bad. 

So Snickers is here with us.  Now Matty quickly became fond of her which is VERY RARE for Mat.  Let me repeat that again, that is VERY RARE for Mat to like a dog so quickly.  Offhandedly Mat made a comment about how Snickers could stay with us indefinitely and that's when our neighbor came up with a thought.  She knew how badly I wanted a second dog, a good family dog/guard dog and she asked us if we would like to have Snickers for a week to try it out and see if she might be the dog for us.  Mat was thrilled believe this or not.  I know it sounds weird eh, Mat actually liking a dog other than Guinness.  With having Guinness another dog has big paws to fill due to Guinness being exceptionally well behaved.  So this makes mat very, what's the word picky.  I don't blame him.  We've had a couple of attempts at dogs since Guinness became a part of the family, and well they failed.  It's hard to take care of and train an already out of new puppy hood dog when you have your own little pookas who need you first and foremost.

So, with the other two dogs we've had since Guinness (as I stated what a shock to see mat like this girl dog.)  Snickers was happy to know that Matty liked her and she tried to be the best cutest little dog in the first few days here.  She listened to everything Matty told her.  WOW! I mean she was like so well behaved.  Then, I dunno what happened, she got used to us lol.  She started running off out the door and Matty would have to chase her around the neighborhood.  Dang, suck, but truthfully most dogs do that.  Even Lucky, our other neighbors beautiful red golden retriever is showing that he can be stubborn and do what he wants.  Now Lucky, he's the best behaved dog in the neighborhood.  Though since we've had two females here he has started to take to not listening to his owner, that's an uh oh. 

Well, back to Snickers.  She's a Boxer, Beagle Mix if you were wondering and she is Brindle in color. She's darn cute.  She's three years old and as were learning, bi-polar lol.  Well, I decided one night that I had to test Snickers food aggression with humans due to the fact that Elish is used to playing in Guinness's water dish and food bowel when he is and isn't eating his food.  We already knew that she had aggression with eating around other dogs, and over here she liked to guard the room that the food bowel was in.  So one night there's Elish playing with a toy dinosaur in Snickers food dish while Snickers was out with Mat, I thought uh oh, I better test this when she comes back.  When she came back there were some food pellets on the floor beside her dish so as she was eating I would put one pellet after another in her dish as this is quite tame compared to what Elish can do around dogs while they're eating.  As my dumb luck would have it Snickers growled the snappiest scariest growl as she simultaneously took my hand into her mouth and bit me.  BUT here's the kicker, she bit so very gentle as to not draw blood but she held my hand there locked with much pressure as she growl.  Well immediately after I was done shaking I turned to Google to search for dog food aggression and how to change it. I found several sites regarding trying to feed the dog from your hands and skip the bowls all together so that the dog understands that YOU are the one who feeds it and that my hand is not something to be threatened by. So I did this, boy was I scared as heck too.  But it worked!  So this is how I continued to feed her unless she was outside.  We had to put her outside for a while because she "attacked" Alexander.  The classic issue where dog is stupid and cat is PMS like and the dog just doesn't know how to stay out of the cat's face despite all the warnings the cat has given the dog.  So on the last warning from Alexander to Snickers, Which was Alexander pawing with that quick boxer like punch and hissing Snickers took Alexander down with the same if not worse scary growling and barking type fierceness she had done to my hand with the food bowl issue.  So we didn't know what to do.  We put her outside for a while.  We were still in the try her for a week phase.  I'm so glad my neighbor came up with that idea as opposed to Mat just saying we'll take her for sure on the spot. My neighbor, she's a real smart and level headed woman who I regard very highly so I'm glad she was thinking ahead.

So here we are, Mat's sad that Snickers isn't being as well behaved as when we first had her in the house because he liked her so much.   

In the meantime I start looking for puppies again because  I really really want a second dog and I'm apprehensive about Elish being around Snickers eating.  See Guinness likes to leave his food dish with food in it throughout the day.  We feed him twice, once in the A.M and once in the P.M. and in-between that time Elish will go play in his food dishes.  As we were learning Snickers would go to Guinness dish as well through the day and snap at Guinness if he came near it.  Hence the apprehensiveness with Elish.  The what if's were creeping in.  What if I was helping Autumn with something or Willow in the other room and Elish went to play in Guinness's food dish while Snickers just happened to be there.  See my worry?

Well, dang suck right.  I really felt bad for Mat because this is like the sixteenth gazillionth time he has really liked an animal and it just went foobar.  Is the poor guy jinxed?  :(

So dumb ass me, I look one morning at craigs list, while mind you I haven't told my dear friend and neighbor any of this about Snickers yet because I didn't want to tell her over the phone and the last long conversation we had had, Snickers was doing awesome.

So there I am on craigs list and the first puppy I see looks like a German Shepherd mix and I am like wow just want I want.  So Matty is in the bathroom letting some kids off at the pool while I'm Google searching lab Shepherd mix puppy images to verify the markings the look etc.  Then it hit's me, the ad said lab mix right?  Well, I thought heck a Rottweiler and Shepherd really have the same markings in the front just a different build as they grow older.  So I started the search on Rott Lab puppy mixes.  I just couldn't tell for sure what she was.

So I call the number listed on the ad.  A very nice woman answers the phone and tells me that she's a lab Rott mix and that they are moving into a new home and cannot keep her.  So we call her and mat agrees to go out and see her because he knows that I've been longing for a puppy that I can train for some time now. 

Well we get there finally after getting lost. LOVE you Mat :P  The dog is super freakin cute, not just cute beautiful with HUGE paws.  She's chocolate and tan with green eyes.  Typical Rott/Shepherd pattern.

Well as we're there the owner is telling us about the dog.  Though she's speaking in a very rapid I've had too much coffee and I'm nervous type pattern.  She tells us that the dog is great with kids, she's house trained (that she's only had one pee pee accident in the house since they've owned her and none since.) She loves other dogs, apparently their neighbor has two golden retrievers and Samantha (previously Karmen) loved playing with them.  She understands how to stay in the yard and come back to you when called back if she wanders to far.  She jumps up on you when she gets excited however she understands her limits with jumping near or on little children.  SO great right!!! Wow so freakin cute. Well that's when I notice that it looks like she's been bit on her ear by another animal.  So I ask, " Was she bit?"  The previous owner seems off guard by this and that's when she rolls into this huge long story about the dogs skin allergies.  The owner  said that one night the dog was out to go poo in the backyard and when she came back in she was itching like mad and also itching like mad the entire night.  Well the owner ended up taking the dog to the vet and thus began her first round of visits.  The owner tried to explain to us that the vet was trying to put the dog on a different brand of food to see if that was causing the issue.  (Let me just interject here that one night spent with the dog and I believe I have the answer based on my own personal and up close experience with itchiness at the odd hours of night all over the body.) None the less I tried to call her previous vet to get her records, however there is a privacy act so I had to try and contact the previous owner to ask her to call the vet to release the records to me so that I can tell her vet that it's okay to release the records to my vet. Bureaucracy at work for you.  Okay, so I find out finally from her vet that (Karmen) SAMANTHA has had a scraping done which showed up negative under the microscope for Scabies however I believe this poor dog truly has mange. Which case of it I'm not quite sure yet.  From what I understand it is quite hard to actually get the mange mite under the scope so most scrapings come out negative.  Mange link here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mange

I have been glued to the net when possible searching up and down from left to right and everywhere in-between about dogs and itching.  I truly hope that it is something that we can easily take care of.  It turns out that I found out from the previous vet that this poor pup has been on different rounds of this and that antibiotic and drug to try to alleviate this condition. NOTICE though that the vet totally skipped out on treating her for mange!  So as luck would have it and the I ching told me 8 months ago that in the eighth month there would be great evil.  Well it's the eighth month since the reading and man this surely would be a great evil. In biblical text this would constitute a nice plague on this poor animal.

So, I must never under estimate the power of the Creator and I'm praying that this stops. That this poor itchy dog will be healed.

We gave her a borax and hydrogen peroxide bath last night.  I applied Neem oil today.  The reason why I believe it to be mange is because it is worse at night.

If you are wondering where the previous owner got the dog, it was from an Amish farm. Cool, I can dig the Amish seriously, though I think they need to stop driving cars and go back to things old school. 

As for things with Snickers, this little three year old ball of energy has me seriously confused.  Snickers is the Beagal Boxer mix.  The past few days she has been tied out on the lead during the day and little Samantha has been playing with her as well as eating from Snickers dog dish. WTF ?  Snickers does not get aggressive with the puppy when she's on the lead, but yet when Snickers is eating indoors she snaps and growls at the puppy.  However I read on the net that aside from hand feeding Snickers I should also not keep the dogs separated when they are eating that by eating together they will soon learn to react and act the way Guinness does around food, which is, well you all know, he doesn't care what goes on near his food dish, chews or toys.  Yet I read some other articles on the net that suggest against feeding together so who really knows???????

Sigh~

Anyway We bring Snickers in at night and she sleeps on a little bed at the end of our bed.  Snickers is in here now and all the dogs seem to be doing well together, Snickers is truly enjoying Samantha!!!!

Now if I can just get to the root of Samantha's itching and I pray to the creator that it is not the contagious mange and if it is truly a food allergy then I want to start feeding her chicken and a raw food dog diet.

Also as the Universe would have it, I was looking up pictures of German Shepherds to compare and contrast Samantha's markings today so i could show you what she looked like then I  remembered to get her picture off of craigs list  when i found this :

http://limaohio.craigslist.org/pet/662266973.html

Well My neighbor Brendan is here so I'm getting off the net.  Brendan is my friend's son. My friend actually that i grew up with here in this neighborhood. She's moved around as well as myself and now we're both back here with our families.  Odd how that works out eh? Brendan and Zach own Snickers.

Ohhhhh also before I forget the coolest thing, I love Brendan and Zach, they always want to help out around here, Brendan brought over a cool pillow that he made for us last night.  A family pillow with our initials on it!!!!! SWEEET!