From the Styx by Peggy Tibbetts

This is Part 6 in the Crazy Bitch series about our Akbash/Lab mix Venus. She has Canine Compulsive Disorder (CCD) with aggression. Links to the five previous episodes can be found at the end of this post.

Panicky Pup

Wouldn’t it be nice if dogs could talk? Then Venus could lie on the couch, as she loves to do, and tell us what’s really bugging her.

Instead we have to learn a different way to communicate with our dogs. Most of the time, we humans muddle our way through various training methods and achieve a healthy relationship with our dogs. However when good dogs go bad, Cesar Millan’s proven method of rehabilitation through dog psychology really is the solution. Just by watching Dog Whisperer episodes we have been learning how to recognize signals of anxiety and dominance in Venus’s behavior and how to correct her.

On December 2, Venus was scheduled for her 4 week checkup. The night before, Tod and I discussed keeping her Clomipramine dosage at 75 mg twice a day. The day we accidentally double dosed her with 100 mg she had acted sluggish. At 75 mg she was still Venus, yet calmer and more amenable to training. She had responded so quickly to the techniques we’d learned from Cesar, we almost felt like we were cheating with the drug. Almost.

Dr. Pearce was impressed with how well Venus was doing. She explained that the next dosage level would be 100 mg, then up to a maximum 125 mg twice a day according to Venus’s weight, which was 90 lbs.

“We’ve decided we’d like to keep her at her current dosage,” I told her. “We’re addicted to the Dog Whisperer. We’re using his dog psychology method on her, and it’s working.”

Dr. Pearce was a little surprised but she confessed she loves the show, too. “It’s obviously working. Venus is so calm today. So let’s keep her on 75 mg. If you change your minds at any point just call me.”

I told her the only problem Venus had with the pills was sometimes she gagged.

“How do you pill her?” she asked.

“I just stick it down her throat,” I said.

“Clomipramine can cause dry mouth. It probably gets stuck and dissolves in her throat. It’s pretty bitter. Try putting it in a spoonful of peanut butter.”

The peanut butter trick led to a funny illustration of the difference between Zeus and Venus. Zeus takes Soloxine twice a day for hypothyroidism. So we pill them at the same time. I tried the peanut butter that evening. Venus loved it. Zeus wrinkled his nose but ate it anyway. The next morning he was ready for me. He rolled his tongue along the roof of his mouth and the wad of peanut butter shot across the room. I cracked up. It was news to me he didn’t like peanut butter. Or else he preferred the finger down his throat. Weird dog.

Finding the magic dosage plus Cesar’s training method gave us a whole lot of confidence with Venus. Progress was slow but it was – well – PROGRESS. Training her to control her behavior was only half of her rehabilitation. We needed to understand the psychological factors that led to her meltdown. When rehabilitating a dog, Cesar always takes into consideration the dog’s history and breed. Likewise we evaluated Venus. There must have been some signs we missed along the way.

Venus was ten months old when we adopted her from a family in April 2006. She was born May 31, 2005. Gemini. I know. The Twins. Dual personalities much?

The mom said they had to give her up because she and her husband (we didn’t meet him) were working long hours and their 2 kids were in school so they didn’t have time to spend with her. The mom and kids seemed frustrated and sad. She had escaped from their fenced-in yard several times and was destructive when she was confined alone indoors. The mom said Venus’s hobby was sitting on the couch and watching TV. That seemed odd as I stood in their tiny yard watching a very high energy pup tearing around with Zeus. She didn’t really act like a couch potato.

Zeus came along with us because we had to be sure they liked each other before we brought her home. It looked like love at first sight. Venus wasn’t the least bit territorial. The 2 dogs ran around and played like normal dogs do. So we decided to take her home.

The mom also said she was part Great Pyrenees and part Lab. We knew a lot about both breeds. Labs are good-natured, high energy dogs and Great Pyrenees are mellow, low energy. Seemed like a good mix, which gave us a lot of confidence about training her.

Once we got her home we quickly discovered why Zeus was so delighted. She was in heat. Even neutered males respond to female hormones so we took her to the vet right away for spaying. After surgery, Venus was easy going. She responded to leash training, though it was obvious she’d had very little in the way of training.

In place of discipline, she had evidently been punished. When told to “sit and stay” she cowered, then tried to flee – and often did. Her behavior told us that most likely someone had smacked her in the sit and stay position. “Sit and stay” is, of course, the cornerstone of every dog obedience regimen. Building trust was a challenge. She was also afraid of bathrooms, so we assumed she had been locked in the bathroom for long periods of time.

It took Zeus a long time to adjust to Venus. During the first couple weeks every time Ema came over, he acted over eager around her and sort of pushed Venus off on her. Then after she left, he acted sullen and ignored Venus. We thought then and still believe he wanted Ema to take Venus home with her, like she did with her two dogs whenever they came over. Eventually Ema’s dogs went home. He was trying to get rid of Venus. He knew something we didn’t.

As she recovered from the surgery, more behavior problems arose. Twice she climbed our fence and escaped our yard.

Venus the puppy planned her escape 4/17/06

We installed an electric wire around the perimeter of our fence. After one low volt buzz at the gate she never tried to escape again.

Zeus has always trusted and accepted me and Tod as his pack leaders. Because he is the older, more stable dog, we assumed Venus would be submissive toward him and learn from his behavior. For the most part she did, yet sometimes she rebelled against her place in our pack. There were 4 incidents during the first 3 months.

The first incident happened during the first month. While they were playing tag in the yard Venus grabbed Zeus by the collar. Her lower jaw got tangled up, she panicked and began snapping and snarling. Luckily I was at home and managed to unhook his collar before she strangled him. Zeus and I were both bitten in the process. I kept Zeus’s collar off for a couple weeks. I played with them daily to show Venus how to play fair. It worked and we eventually put Zeus’s collar back on, though I loosened it to slip off easily. When she nipped at his collar during play we stopped her.  

On a camping trip to Moab, Venus started eating Zeus’s food. He walked over and growled at her and she attacked him. He pinned her down on the ground and we pulled them apart. The fight amounted to no more than gnashing of the teeth and a lot of saliva but nobody was injured. We felt that Zeus had handled the incident properly by putting her in her place and nothing more needed to be done. We thought Venus was crazy to take him on and she’d learned her lesson.

Several weeks later I stood on the porch talking to Zeus and scratching his ears. Venus came up to us and started nose bopping. Zeus gave a low growl to tell her to back off. She snapped and snarled at him. I grabbed her collar to pull her away from Zeus and she bit my arm. It could also be said that my arm was in the way when she snapped at Zeus and I got bit. It’s true but it’s no excuse. Biting me was unacceptable.  

We thought her behavior was related to having her spayed while she was in heat, which can cause a sudden decrease in estrogen, along with more pronounced testosterone. It seemed logical that a testosterone surge could have caused her anxious dominant behavior.

We put her on the homeopathic remedy Aggression Formula. The remedy combined with exercise, training, and socialization worked well. On a camping trip to the Flattops she dug up an elk bone and teased Zeus with it. We told her to stop and tried to get the bone away from her, which began a game of keep away. Zeus stepped in and growled at her. She dropped the bone and lunged at him. Because we were right in the middle of it, we separated them before a fight broke out. Tod grabbed her and I snatched the bone. He put her in the camper for a time out and gave her some Aggression Formula. Meanwhile I hid the bone in the pickup. She calmed down and that was the end of it.

We kept Venus on the Aggression Formula for about six months. There were no more incidents. She seemed happier and more stable. Venus and Zeus became good buddies. She accepted Tod and my roles as pack leaders and Zeus’s calm assertive dominance over her. She played well with the other dogs at Dogland.  If another dog attacked her she did fight back but that’s pretty much normal dog behavior. She has always adored Hailey, our 7-year old granddaughter, and has never even looked cross-eyed at her. She has loved our cats like they’re her little lambs and has never so much as snapped at one of them.

Now that we have a better understanding of dog psychology, there were probably some things we could have done better back then. Because we achieved the results we wanted, we felt satisfied. In retrospect, we don’t believe that we fully understood her anxiety. In the past we either ignored it or yelled at her. The problem is, Venus responds to anger and/or fear with more anxiety. If we need to raise our voices, we’ve learned to do so with authority, not anger. We’ve learned to address her anxiety by distracting her and making her calm down. Then we reward her calm behavior.

As I mentioned, Venus showed signs that she had been severely punished and shut in the bathroom when she was a puppy. Her early bad behaviors seemed rooted in separation anxiety. We have come to the conclusion that she probably wasn’t abused. It seems more likely that the punishment and confinement caused her to develop anxiety, but not necessarily aggression. The snapping, snarling, even biting that Venus engaged in when we first adopted her amounted to an undisciplined puppy testing the pack. The aggression she displayed last summer and fall was something else.

The puzzle pieces had begun to fall into place. We had the anxiety thing figured out. But we still had obsession and aggression staring us in the face.

Medical researchers and Cesar also point to breed as a factor. The previous owner had said Venus was part Great Pyrenees and part Lab. Last summer we realized the mom was mistaken. Venus is a whole nother breed. 

Stay tuned for Part 7

Part 1: Tale of Two Dogs

Part 2: Dog Bomb

Part 3: Sick Puppy

Part 4: Torn Between Two Dogs

Part 5: The Dog Whisperer

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