The Honeymoon's Over

Spencer has come into his own. I must say that we didn't expect it so soon. He's comfortable with his surroundings and is making it his own. His anxiety is gone, he's not in as much discomfort (pelvis), and now he wants to have fun.

This isn't all bad but we must be on guard even more than before. He's wanting to play more with Viking and Lily. Viking mostly wants nothing to do with him. This isn't anything new. Viking's always been an independent little guy. He's so human it's scary. And when it comes to Lily, he wants to play with her but given a 70 lb difference between them he can squash her pretty easily and we've already had a yelp or two. So we thought we had everything figured out...we'd just let them out separately. But his playfulness has now gone from wanting to play outside to wanting to play inside. And it doesn't matter if we walk him, he wants to have play interaction with the other dogs.

Once again, we thought we had it under control, but when David's been coming home the house has been in disarray. It's not like things are torn up, but it looks like Spencer's been trying to play. A simple answer to this is to kennel him, which we did the first several days we had him. We did all the right things...giving him treats, making it a happy place, but after several days he put his brakes on and wouldn't get near the kennel. And since I'm the last one to leave in the morning I have no way to get him in the kennel. And we didn't want the kennel to be a bad thing, so the muzzle was put on and he was let free to roam. Things seemed to go pretty well. We had a few scratches on our back door from him trying to look out the window (we now keep the shade closed and have had no further problems).

So everything was going well until Spencer started coming into his own and I think it's time to regroup. This is nothing new to us. We're the people that bought a playpen and made it easily cleanable for Lily so that she could "sleep" with us at night. And we're also the people that tore up ALL of our carpet in our house and refinished the hardwood floors to for easier cleanup of poopie accidents. Going into adopting we knew that all of this was a possibility, and we were willing to make changes, and the time has come.

So that leaves us with, what should we do? We've had several ideas. We could just kennel Lily and Viking again. I'd feel absolutely horrible about this given that they have done nothing wrong and all they'd think is, "This huge dog came into our house and took over and now we're getting in trouble." Not a good idea. We thought about gating him in the kitchen but weren't too sure about that given that the cats have now taken to the kitchen being "their area." I'd hate to evict them from another place again. We've come to the conclusion to give him the downstairs bedroom. We will begin with just a baby gate but I can see us ending up sawing the door in half. We'd love to do that now but we want to make sure that this idea is even do-able before jumping the gun and possibly ruining a door. So the litterboxes will be relocated for the animals and the new area will be called Spencer's Cove per David. I'd love to end up making it secure enough that we'd be able to take the muzzle off while we're away. I understand the the muzzle is important and that he sees it almost as part of his body, but I'm sure he'd prefer it to be off.

Some people may think that we're taking this to extremes but I want to let them know that this is nothing special. We have friends that have greyhounds and smaller dogs. They co-exist great, but they only interact while fuller supervised. This will be no different than anyone else. In addition, when Spencer's fuller healed we'll be able to make playdates with our friends and their greyhounds.

Ah the joys of being pet owners, but we truly do love it.