First day bringing Pixie home from Fairbault, MN. She was originally named Susie.
A few weeks ago coming home from the Dog Park.
My little baby is growing up, today is her three year old puppy that I’ve had since she was twelve weeks old. Pixie Bug Jackie Young is her official full name or PBJ for short. Her mother was a rescue in Tennessee that was abandoned in a railroad car where she was found to be pregnant by a rescue group. Now no one believes this, but her mother was a fawn colored Welsh Corgi. We believe her father was a Jack Russel Terrier or a Rat Terrier, hence the nickname Jackie, and her very terrier like appearance. She had six brothers and sisters that were all adopted through the same foster home where they were born. We originally were going to adopt her sister Romana, but after meeting half of her siblings ended up driving home with Susie as she was called at the time.
Her legs have grown ridiculously long and a long of her black has vanished into brown. She is still anxious about cars, storms, and loud noises. As well as army crawling while on walks and eating away from her bowl. Her favorite toys have remained relatively the same: tennis balls, green sneaky ring from Kong, antlers, bones and balls in general. She cannot have plush toys or they are destroyed in less than ten minutes.
Training Tips
And she has not been easy for training, especially when it came to learning to help her out with her anxiety and learning how to handle different situations so you get the best results. Like with loud noises and storms, the best advice I can give from my experience is just to ignore it. Pixie will disappear to find somewhere to hide and feel safe, that’s somewhere close to where I am. Bringing attention to it only makes things 90% worse and she freaks out more. So just letting her find somewhere to hide and feel better is the best I can do for her. You can always get prescriptions from the doctors, but she does find enough without them as long as you completely ignore her.
Same went for barking when people came to the door or walked past the house. Now this one we don’t have down 100%, but she has gone from barking for thirty minutes to barking for a minute or two. And mainly she just wants to say hi or kiss the person… that is unless her anxiety takes over then she’ll nervous bark for ages. I have not figured that one out other than not having her out and about when people come over unless she’s met them alone several times outside of the house.
Potty training… this one we had no issues with, she figured it out right away and didn’t make messes in the house when we had to leave during the day for work. However, since moving she has started to make a few messes with pooping near the front door as she seems to have “forgotten” how to ask to go outside. This has mainly been the case when it comes to asking my roommates as she can’t always wait until I get home especially on days where I’m working/out of the house for fourteen to fifteen hours.
Best thing you can do is take your dog to training school and use positive reinforcements. Pixie did fail training school both beginner and immediate level twice. Mainly because she was too scared to actually perform the actions while at the class though she knows the commands inside and out. The commands that Pixie knows by heart and will do them to hand signals without verbal command are: sit (fist moving towards you), lay down (palm moving flat towards the ground), shake/paw (hold palm face up, move to shake), sit pretty or sit up (palm moving towards you), butt down (same hand signal as lay down, this is when her front half is up but back half is high in the air), and dance (twirl finger in air). She also knows the verbal command for wait, settle, and leave it. However, she doesn’t know the command for come but will come when called by name.
We tried to do crate training with Pixie, but discovered she was claustrophobia and would throw up if left in a crate. So on the third night, we gave up on trying to crate train and my bedroom became her crate. She never destroyed anything in my room other than ripping up any socks or clothe hangers left on the floor. And we never had issues after that for her freaking out about being left alone or in a closed space. Sometimes I half wish she did enjoy crates because I know that if we bring her to the pet hotel, she hates the rooms made for her size so we have to always request/pay for the larger individual rooms that have the white noise.
How We’re Celebrating Pixie’s Birthday
Pixie has a really sensitive stomach so I can’t make her pupcakes or any special treats. But I got her a new antler that has a lot more marrow than I try to get. The more marrow that’s showing in an antler means it’s faster to chew through, so for her birthday I got one that has quite a bit of marrow showing so she can enjoy it. We’re also going to her favorite off lease dog park to play fetch with her chuck-it, which she is obsessed with. If that ball is out, literally nothing else in the world exist to her. So we’ll play that and I’m going to take her swimming another one of her favorite activities especially as today really hot outside. I’m going to do the swimming segment first so it keeps her cool while we’re playing fetch at the park.
