The Blood-Curdling Scream

So a few words about Betty the cattle dog.  Betty is a relatively low-maintenance dog, in comparison to the corgis who require virtually contant interaction.  She will spend blissful afternoons laying on the couch sleeping.  Sometimes she wakes up when Gryffyn decides that she needs to bark at Betty just 'cause.  But Betty just looks at her, sighs, and goes back to sleep.
Her only soft spot is thunderstorms--she is terrified of them.  We have tried every kind of tool--thundershirt, rescue remedy, crates, xanax--and none of these have worked very well.  What has worked best, we discovered, is just letting her be scared and freak out.

The only problem with this is that she gets under things--like the bed in the middle of the night when thunderstorms tend to come--and starts jumping around.  However, with the new "just ignore her" high-tech solution, she has tended to settle down after five minutes and then just sleep under there. 

Which is fine.

Until now.

Now she has decided to start screaming--using a remarkably wide range of tones and volumes.  She will begin with a mild wimper, go into a low growl, and then finish off with a crescendo of rising, high pitched scream.  Last night it was the worst.  At one point, it was so loud that I thought someone might call the cops because the noise suggested maybe that someone was being bludgeoned to death. 

We began to wonder how we would explain to the cops that Betty--the bounding barking cattle dog with the happy dufus face in front of them was the one that had been screaming--because she would certainly get herself out from under the bed at the front door bell.  They would have to search the house to make sure there were no bodies tucked away anywhere.

I did at one point crawl under the bed and make sure she wasn't caught on anything or hurt in some way.  Then I popped half a xanax into her in the desperate hope that some sleep could be salvaged from the night (she had been screaming at two hour intervals--just enough time to fall asleep again, only to be woken up by another operatic series of screams).

After I popped the pill in her, she crawled out, got a drink of water, and went to sleep next to me. 

I have NO idea what this is about.  If anyone has any ideas, please send them!

Gryffyn is EMO

In a flurry of activity yesterday, we decided to give away a treadmill that had been sitting in the middle of our small sun porch.  Of course, like everyone else, we never used it.  We joined a gym up the street and love going there.  But the treadmill stayed out of guilt as much as anything else.  What if there's a major storm and we can't get to the gym?  What if the gym closes?  But we spent so much for it?

Finally, we took the plunge, put it down on the sidewalk outside our house, put a "free" sign on it, and it was picked up within two hours.  I spent the rest of the day sprucing the sun room, moving some furniture around, and generally cleaning up. 

As I was doing this work, however, I noticed Gryffyn giving me a worried, perplexed look--first when I moved her water bowl from one side of the sun porch to the other, and second when her food and the bowls got moved to the same side.  She seemed a bit less energetic, but otherwise fine.  She just looked...well...concerned.

This morning, when I got up to feed them, Gryffyn flew at Betty as I went to put the bowls down, and tried to run her out of the sun room.  Betty, who remains fairly detached most of the time, gave her what we call the slap down.  Major growling, paw on Gryffyn's dead, and a squishing her into the floor.  She doesn't hurt her--just let's her know whose boss--so I let her do it.  I proceeded to feed Rhys and Betty first as always, and then fed Gryffyn, who gobbled down her food.

Gryffyn was obviously really worried that her food wasn't going to be there like always.  When we first got her she had some food guarding issues.  But she had begun eating at an almost leisurely pace, at least for a dog.  But the moving around of furniture (and the acquiring of birds--more in a later post) seems to have really thrown her.  We're trying to reassure without validating her feeling that SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG!!  The 14-year old boy looked at her this morning and said "Gryffyn has a very EMO expression this morning."  Yep.  But I'm hoping she'll move beyond it very soon.

Time Out!

When Rhys was a puppy his favorite pasttime was to wait for my partner to walk across from the kitchen to the livingroom, and then leap after her, grabbing her ankles with his teeth.  Herding, in other words.  He was a champion herder--the tiny puppy would enthusiastically try over and over again to make my partner do exactly as he wanted.

What he got was yelled at.

We tried every known solution to the problem.  Treating the right behavior (which was NOT braking the skin on the ankle), severe "NO" to the bad behavior (which was sometimes difficult while looking at the gleeful puppy so proud of himself for living up to his genetic gifts, although not so difficult when blood was running down into the shoes), more exercise, redirected herding instinct, etc etc.

What was NOT supposed to work was time out.  Many training guides scoffed at this option, rolling their verbal eyes at the idea that what worked for children would work for dogs.  Dogs, they say, aren't people. 

Also, the advice goes, NEVER use the crate for punishment.  NEVER.  The dog will then FEAR the crate and all will be lost.

Well, after weeks of this my partner finally snapped and went into parent mode.  She firmly declared "TIME OUT!, picked up the puppy, and put him in his crate for two minutes.  For the next few days this response was repeated over and over again.  Within three or four days Rhys had figured out that if he picked up a toy and bumped the back of our ankles, we would tolerate the behavior.  So his need to herd was finding an outlet, and skin was remaining intact.

To this day we usually only have to threaten time out to get Rhys to stop barking, which he can do incessantly. 

Time out has NEVER worked with Betty the cattle dog.  She just stands there looking quizzical.

Lately, Gryffyn has started barking madly out the front window at everyone that goes by.  This, as one can imagine, gets very tedious (and we don't even live on a very busy street), so I started implementing time out.  I pick her up, gently put her in the bathroom with the light on (this is VERY important--NEVER put a dog in a dark room) and wait 30 seconds.  Within an afternoon threatening time out got her off the couch.

Corgis, it seems, HATE being taken away from the pack--if even for a couple of minutes.  We never put them in time out for more than 30 seconds after they stop barking.  We always make sure the area is well lit.  And we are ALWAYS gentle when putting them in time out.  We have found time out by far the most helpful technique for training the corgis out of unwanted behaviors.

Disclaimers, and other such stuff...

So first, a disclaimer, being as we live in a litigious society.  Neither my partner nor I are trainers and thus offer nothing by way of OFFICIAL information regarding corgis.  We are, instead, providing one household's perspective of dealing with this breed.

Oh, and one cattle dog's perspective (such as we can discern) on living with corgis.  Same for two cats.

And speaking of lawsuits, yesterday was our first day of using Gryffyn's muzzle.  We've been working with her on what we've determined is leash aggression coupled with herding instinct.  People or animals will appear on the walk, she will go berserk (leash aggression), which involves biting us to get us to let go of her (the herding), and we then attempt to isolate and calm her.  This only happens on the walk--everywhere else she is a sweet and gentle pup.

This is particularly worrisome as she is VERY cute, and so people want to pet her EVEN THOUGH she is writhing and snarling.  See picture:

A typical interaction will be: lovely young man walks up, Gryffyn leaps up, teeth baring, grabs the metal leash (she has bitten through two cloth ones), she flails her whole body around, we then isolate her while she flings her open mouth around trying to bite us to let her go--all the while the lovely young man watches and says "so can I pet her?"

Are you kidding me?

What we realized is that our fear of getting bit or her biting others has made us so tense at this point that we're feeding the situation.  So the muzzle.

I had a hard time with the muzzle--I worried it was a sign of failure or oppression.  But it's working out great.  We got the plastic one recommended by Best Friends trainers, put peanut butter at the end of it (which makes her VERY popular with the other two dogs) and off we went.  She still goes nuts with other dogs or people, but now we can proceed with the walk, normalizing the process, and not feeding the anxiety.

So I'm now a fan of the focused and productive use of a muzzle for training.

Why a blog and, more importantly, why Cardigan Corgis?

Why write a blog about Cardigan Corgis?  Of course they're adorable--we have people stop their cars next to us and hold up traffic on a regular basis to exclaim how cute they are.  There also aren't that many of them where we are in Western Pennsylvania.  And when a new Cardi comes on the scene, there is always instant fellowship. 

But they are also the most exasperating breed to deal with on a daily basis.

The short answer is that NONE OF THE RULES WORK with Corgis.  We have a bag full of every training technique, harness, and leash every made (short of the shock collars or spike collars, which we will never use).  None of them work.  We now roll our eyes when offered advice on how to train.

For instance, at the puppy training we went to with Gryffyn, our one-year old female Cardi: our instructor tells the group how they would NEVER have any trouble walking their dogs if they used a Gentle Leader.  She walks five, seven, TEN dogs at a time and NONE of them pull!

We look at one another, roll our eyes, and whisper "unless you have cardigans."

So how do we know that we just aren't terrible with dogs?  Betty the Australian Cattle dog--our third dog is a dream on the walk--never pulls.  Very well-behaved--a total success story.

We have come up with some alternative ways of training our Cardigans that we think might be valuable to share with other Cardi owners.  They always involve positive reinforcement and compassionate treatment.  They may not be the standard way to do things--but we have found that they are The Corgi Way.