Controlling, Obsessive and Neurotic Spaniel. Our journey to calmness [4]

Well it has been longer than two weeks now, actually over three weeks.

What has changed? Sadly not much yet. Roo is resisting the changes quite a bit, which means things are working and she is noticing a change but just doesn't want to give in to it yet.

She is still attention seeking by sitting looking at us or jumping up, she is still unable to settle most of the time on her own and is looking for trouble to get our attention. Roo still mouths our hands if we try to remove her from the sofa. She is still reactive to noises outside our house and still barks at our neighbour. Her lead walking has improved but only so that we can go as far as two houses either side of our house, sometimes to the end of the road but rarely. Roo still fixates and pulls towards people, dogs and cyclists on lead and would chase people off lead. She is still refusing food a lot of the time, it seems she eats enough to not be straving but rarely finishes a meal or even half her meal.

Doens't sound good does it. Well she still does all these things but perhaps not as much as before. This really is baby steps. On some days she definitely barks less in the house and will at times not react if our neighbour comes out. There have been a few occasions where she has settled if only for 15 minutes in the living room whilst we watch tv or meal times where she has eaten all her food. It might seem counterproductive, but we try not to focus on these good moments as we know that tomorrow could be a terrible day. Getting our hopes up always makes the next hard day 100 times harder.

This has been some of the hardest weeks of our lives. Dealing with Roo like this is exhausting and draining, not helped by our week away from hell. There is a blog post up about it if you haven't checked that out already.

If you have a difficult dog, you are not alone in your struggles. Even though it can seem like it most of the time. If you have not spent a day dealing with an anxious or reactive dog, then you cannot imagine the struggle and drain that it is.

All we can do for now is keep doing what we are doing. We have had a phone catch up with our behavourist who told us that we aren't talking weeks, we are talking months to years. She thought after another 6 to 8 months we should be able to look back and notice that changes have happened, hearing that was pretty crushing. We knew the road was long but 6 to 8 months was a lot longer than we had expected to even begin to really see changes. Roo's anxiety is pretty bad and ontop of that she has food issues and now potentially epilepsy which needs to be investigated. There are a lot of things at play.

With Roo's eating, the behavourist was shocked that it is taking this long for her to come round to eating a full meal. She suggested that we switch Roo to a raw diet to ensure that whatever food she is eating is high quality and packed with all the things she needs. So that is what we are going to do. At this point, we will try anything to get her to eat properly because in turn it should help with her mental state. Imagine being anxious and lacking energy and nutrients.