Lost and Found

It has been an emotional few weeks for many local dogs and the owners that love them.  Tonight a vizsla that has been missing on Vancouver Island for seventeen days was finally reunited with her family.  Closer to home in the hiking trails of the north shore mountains there have been other lost dogs.  I know the family of one dog lost and helped hike some trails with Stella this week to search.  That dog was actually lost while helping to track another missing dog.  Thankfully both the original missing dog plus the one I know were both found safe thanks to a ton of volunteers and lots of long, cold and scary days and nights for both the dogs and the searchers.  In our same North Vancouver mountains a flat coated retriever was just found after being lost for 6.5 months and a Bernese Mountain Dog needed a search and rescue team with helicopter to be rescued in dangerous snowy mountain terrain after going missing for 13 days while snowshoeing with its owners.

We live in a large city but are lucky enough to be a short ten minute walk to the wonderful trails of the North Shore mountains.  My dogs enjoy lots of off leash freedom on these trails and we generally stick to fairly easy trails.  Both dogs have very good recall and are very attentive about checking in with me but this has gotten me thinking.  It is a risk-reward tradeoff with off leash hiking and it would be my worst nightmare to lose one of my dogs.  My dogs LOVE to run and romp through the woods and I would hate to let my fear of losing them prevent us from enjoying those wonderful hikes we do daily.    I practice and reward recalls heavily but have decided to also start training a whistle recall.  A whistle carries much further than my voice and doesn't get tired or emotional like a human voice can.   Hopefully we will never have a situation where it would be necessary but I feel it is a good tool to have just in case.  I also make sure that both dogs gets to meet all sorts of people regularly so they are very comfortable with strangers.   

Meanwhile Riley has been recovering nicely from surgery.  We went through a variety of xpen configurations before settling on a location that makes him happy.  We had the staples removed last week and had my vet check out a possible seroma (fluid swelling) that was at one end of the incision.  We ended up putting him on a course of antibiotics just in case the fluid was from an infection.  The incision is now a normal size with just a small bit of scar tissue and he is getting stronger every day.  He wasn't happy when he couldn't romp in the snow this week but we are now almost three weeks post op and hope to start swim therapy next week so things are looking up for him :).  Stella is now nearing the end of her heat cycle and is feeling much more like her regular bouncy, happy self.  Her cycle makes her quite sleepy and more nervous/jumpy than normal so we haven't done much (any!) training this month but hope to get some stuff in over the holidays.

Hopefully we will soon be back to these sorts of scenes.

Heat Cycle Follow-Up

This is a follow up blog to the post on  Stella's first heat cycle.  Stella finished her heat cycle in the first few days of May.  She is now in the diestrus phase which means her body is hormonally pregnant even if she is not.   Some dogs will show symptoms of false pregnancy during this time.  This phase typically lasts two to three months until we go into the dormant anestrus phase between heat cycles.  We are just now closing in on two months since the end of her season.

The first few weeks after her heat were "interesting".  Although she was finished her season she seemed to retain a lingering smell that was attractive to other dogs.   She is generally a meek dog when she meets new dogs and initially throws out submissive, calming signals and then bounces more into her normal playful self.   While she was in this stage she became defensive of dogs smelling her and actually air snapped at dogs that got personal.  It was not a comfortable behaviour for her so I did my best to keep her out of those types of situations.  Riley also continued to be interested in her during that time but she was able to handle him better by diverting his advances into more play type behaviours or just sitting down until we would redirect him away from her.   Those behaviours from other dogs have greatly reduced but she continues to have an attractive smell to some male dogs that we meet.  Luckily those smelling episodes are not nearly as intense as the earlier ones so she is able to cope with being "checked out" and I can usually easily just call her away.  Apparently that is not very common but is not unheard of as their bodies return back to normal hormonal levels.  It is possible that because this is her first cycle that things are still kinda wacky.  I am hopeful that will stop over the next few weeks.

Her nipples and vulva reduced noticeably at the end of her heat and then there have been very slow minor changes since then.  I've noticed just this week that her vulva area is pretty much back to normal but is more pronounced than before.  Her nipples have lost almost all the puffiness although the actual nipples are still a bigger size and will also stay that way.

She had problems with her ears as well.  They developed little scabby cracks around some of the edges.  I'm not sure it this was from Riley licking her ears or if it was just a bit of her immune system recovering but again I hear it is a common happening with Vizslas.  My vet told me to keep them moist and protected from insects.  I tried a few things.  I'm not a fan of antibiotic ointments except in specific instances so did not use those.  Bag balm worked okay but is quite sticky and she hated the smell of it.  I then remembered virgin coconut oil which I tried and had very good success with.  It melts fast, absorbs quickly and has natural anti-fungal properties.  I just coated the ear a few times a day and within a few days they were healed.     

There have been a few minor changes in her temperment as well.  She never used to mark very much on walks prior to her heat but does a lot more of that now.  Some of her single dog to dog greetings when we meet on the trails are a bit different as well.  She seems to focus in on the approaching dog, then barks and bounces in a manner that borders on a ruder style of greeting.  I think that is probably a combination of her age, having extra attention from dogs smelling her, and also being walked more alone due to Riley's recent exercise restrictions.  She would normally just take her cues from him and now is working out more of her own thing.  Luckily it is easy to tell by her body language when she is going to greet like that so I call her back into heel, reward and walk a few steps and then give her the "go see" command which breaks up the pattern and she greets appropriately.

I have cut back her food a bit the past few weeks as I think she has put on a few pounds since the end of her cycle.   I haven't weighed her recently but she was 39-40 pounds heading into her heat which I thought seemed to be a good weight for her.  I will monitor that to see if she returns back to her normal food requirements over the next few weeks as she leaves the diestrus phase or perhaps this is just a symptom of her normal food requirements leveling off at lower levels as she is finishing growing.

Today is Canada Day so I leave you with a pic of my smiling Lucy on a sunny Canada Day a few years ago shortly before we said goodbye.

Stella's first heat cycle

We survived!  Our little vizsla girl has finally finished her first heat cycle.  It was pretty much a textbook 21 day cycle and started April 10th.  She turned ten months end of March so that is well within the expected time frame for a first season.  I had been hoping she would be a late bloomer but in hindsight the timing was actually pretty good as we weren't travelling during that time and now we should be free of that concern for the summer camping season.  We had been registered for her Canine Good Neighbour test but opted to defer that until after her heat.

This was my first time having a dog in heat.  Lucy was spayed before her first cycle but my breeder requires Stella to be a year old before spay.  I agree with this as there seems to be a lot of research now that showing the benefits of waiting.  Here are a few articles discussing the benefits of waiting. LongTermHealthEffectsOfSpayNeuterInDogs.pdf and Caninesports.com/SpayNeuter.html.   Natural hormones are important in the process of growth and the closing of the growth plates.  Dogs spayed or neutered after the close of the growth plates have a lower incidence of hip displaysia and other musculoskelatal problems.  There are lots of other factors to consider including higher incidences of some forms of cancer.  Of course there are probably just as much other information out there showing health benefits of early spay but this information makes sense for me.  I will spay Stella as I have zero plans to breed and I know this is not something I want to deal with all the time but am still weighing options as to when that would be.

I suspected she was coming into heat for a little while before she actually did.  Her vulva was swelling and she was spending more time cleaning that area.  Riley was the true barometer of the fact that she had actually come into heat.  The wednesday that we count as day one he was VERY interested in smelling her first thing in the morning.  That night was when we noticed the first blood drops and by the next evening she had regular discharge.   We had panties (with panty-liners) for her to wear in the house and she was mostly tolerant of them although often pushed them aside to clean herself.  I didn't make her wear the panties when we were out walking or if she was crated.  If she was upstairs with me in my office I also left them off as there is no carpet and I had the couch and her bed covered.  I think it was good to allow fresh air to those places when cover up wasn't absolutely necessary.

There were minor changes in her temperment.  She was less cuddlier than normal, had a harder time focusing, more subdued than normal and was very tired especially when she moved into standing heat.  She was also super hungry for the days leading up to her heat and for about the first week.  The biggest problem we had was dealing with Riley who was very enamored with her.   Riley is neutered so is unable to make her pregnant but supposedly is still able to "do the deed".   He wasn't bad for the first 4-5 days but got progressively more "pain-in-the-butt" as the days progressed.  I don't know if Stella was being flirty in those early days or if she was just enjoying that Riley was so happy to "play" with her.

I wasn't really sure if I had noticed the actual first day of her heat so I began leash restrictions probably around day six.  I also chose trails where I avoided the dog-walker groups we often see on our regular route.   I was worried that I had missed the first signs and wouldn't recognize the discharge changes so wouldn't know if she was in "standing heat".  When she really did reach standing heat I noticed the change in discharge colour that the information talks about but for her it actually always still retained quite a pinkish tinge but was different from the initial darker red discharge.  She also began marking a ton on our walks which is unusual for her.  Riley's attention went into overdrive and that was made worse with her bugging him.  I'm surprised her ears aren't all chapped because he constantly licked them and her head as he tried to seduce her. We got lots of work on our down-stays on dog beds across the room from each other!  We also took one dog with us whenever possible to give us all peace.   The saving grace in this time was that Stella was sleepy and content to hang out upstairs in my office with me while I worked through income tax long evenings.  I actually felt quite bad for poor Riley because for a while it seemed like he was told to leave her alone at all the time or placed in a down stay.  It was biology talking loudly and sometimes it was darn frustrating for all of us!

There was again the noticeable change around day 17-18 in discharge back to a darker colour for another 2-3 days as she came out of standing heat.  I had noticed her vulva began shrinking before that and it continues to return to a more normal size.  I noticed today (day 22?) that her nipples have also begun to reduce in size again although I hear they will never go back to where they were prior to the first heat.  Riley continued to be very interested in her right up to almost the end.  Yesterday I finally noticed a shift back to their normal dynamic.     It helped that she deflected his advances very well these past few days and turned them more into play.  I never saw her show her teeth to him at all through the whole thing but a dog was getting more personal with her than she wanted yesterday and she was fine appropriately showing her teeth in that instance.    I will continue to walk on the less populated trails for the next few days and hopefully by next week all will be normal. 

With regards to temperment changes I was very happy to see the return of our bouncy, happy little vizsla at around day 18.  Her energy is back to normal levels, she constantly has a toy or sock etc stuffed in her mouth and is also back loving her regular snuggle sessions.   I learned a lot but they are lessons I am happy to not be dealing with every day!

*** Update July 1, 2012 - Please see follow up post to Stella's first heat cycle. ***