Keeping Me Humble -- July 17, 2014

In the few months since my last blog, Bing turned 9 years old on May 2. Not a major milestone, but inching ever toward becoming older. He is still very active, takes long walks with me and grueling hikes sometimes with Pete.

I have noticed, over time, that Bing seems to cycle in his ability to handle stress. There are times he accepts life beautifully, and other times he simply cannot handle any digression from the usual events of the day. The week before the 4th of July week, I noticed that he started to become agitated more easily. He had been on a very restricted diet since March and was doing quite well on it with little in the way of itching, although he was and is still on Apoquel. He has done three series of food elimination diets, and I think they were cumulatively successful to some degree.

I started giving him the Apoquel (the new anti-itch allergy pill) every second day about a month ago, and he continued to do very well. The only itching we saw was when we actually scratched his chest/belly. Otherwise he didn’t go after himself at all. But with the one year anniversary of his traumatic event approaching at the end of June (read Bing Blog 65), I was loathe to take it much further. I had also started getting lazy and adding some forbidden foods back to his diet, such as beef and rice. The vet agreed that we should give the new foods two weeks to show an issue before further fading his pill regimen to every three days.

It is possible that the addition of these foods has agitated his anxiety, but it is difficult to quantify.  An example is last Monday. We were on a walk with Tango and Cyan, and Cyan wanted to go back to the van to get her butterfly net. She opened the van door, and Bing desperately wanted to get in. She did not allow it, and at the same time Tango was trying to get in. Bing directed his anxiety on Tango (snap and scare), who squealed. We walked to the stream and Bing was fine, until the black flies started bugging his ears. He became frantic and only wanted to get back to the van. Upon reaching home, he heard the barking of the neighbor dogs, who had returned home from being away for 5 days. There is no love lost between their dogs and ours, and the barking set him on a frenzy. Moments after arriving home, the neighbor stopped by to collect something, and Bing simply could not handle his presence at all. His stress level to this sequence of events was certainly cumulative, and way above what one would consider within normal levels of stress.

Another example includes an inability to sit quietly in the pole barn or the training room during a calm class with four other dogs. The exercise we were working on was simply to sit and wait for your dog to look at you, click and treat. Bing hopped around and barked and screamed at me while quickly changing his position from a stand to a sit to a down. He did not calm down over an hour class of similarly simple, quiet exercises.

These events have culminated in my increasing his Trazodone dose to 2 twice a day. It seems to be helpful to him, although it does make him a bit sleepier. At age 9, I would rather have a dog who is less frantic than one who is hyper and ready to go.

I will now have to closely watch his food intake again, and experiment a bit with his Trazodone levels to ascertain whether this is part of his cycle of behavior, and/or if it is related to adding new ‘forbidden’ foods.

Dr. Overall has asked me whether his vision continues to be good. I always doubted his vision, so this is possible. We also suspect some hearing loss in our old friend.

In general, though, he is aging nicely.


Ali

 

Bing Blog 69