Here’s the issue: Polaris is now two years old. She had a very traumatic puppyhood and, well . . . she’s a bit of a spazz. She’s nervous and energetic, afraid of strangers and very skittish.
Last night, I caught her pulling on her tail again. (She doesn’t do it all the time-- maybe once or twice a month.) She lays on the floor, grabs her tail with her mouth and pulls as hard as she can. Her body actually bows up from the strain. She’ll rip out a tuft of hair, eat it, and then go back to pulling. She does the same with the hair between her toes.
She is perfectly healthy with no skin problems. Nothing stressful happened last night. She’s not bored or inactive. (She plays constantly with my other young dog.)
She has other behaviors I might term as “OCD”, such as trying to bury a treat in the carpet, scraping her nose on the floor until it’s raw. She also tries to “bury” her food with her water. (I correct her, but she goes right back to it as if she’s somehow compelled to do it.)
Is this a medical issue or a behavioral one? (I don’t want to medicate her if there’s any other options.) IIs correcting her for these behaviors the right approach?
At the very least you should have the dog evaluated by a vet and get their professional opinion. If medication is what she needs, then I think it would be wrong not to provide it. Imagine being in her place and being unable to stop harmful compulsive behaviors like rubbing your nose raw or pulling out your hair?
I wouldn’t keep her off of medication if that’s what she really needs. One of my other dogs has anxiety problems which are treated with medication. My hesitation is only that some of these meds can have bad side effects, and I know from experience that some of them actually make the problems worse. I’d hate for her to have to go through that.
Don’t get me wrong: 99.9% of the time, she’s a very happy dog. It just seems like every couple of weeks, some sort of compulsion takes over. It’s short-lived and afterwards, she’s back to her normal, bouncy self. Considering the infrequency and temporary nature of these behaviors, I’m hesitant to medicate her full-time if there are other ways to deal with it. I was hoping someone else on here might have had a similar experience and could advise me.
I know what you mean Lissa about the medication and long term effects.
The vet gave old dog Doxepin for chewing. He did have allergies but she said it wasn’t good to keep them on even allergy medications long range. I think Doxepin is an anti-anxiety medication and from the research I did it didn’t see to have any long term side affects like some medications.
My dog does the burrying in the carpet thing too. I wrote it off as a terrier thing, didn’t know other dogs did that. She mainly does that when she’s bored.
I wouldn’t say to “correct” the dog if it is exhibiting OCD tendancies, (that might just stress her out worse) but “occupy” her. When she gets in an OCD mode, can you interact with her at all? It would be a great time to try some training. Get her mind and body going in another direction.
As a supplemental to prescription meds, have you tried DAP? (Dog Appeasement Pheromones) I’ve heard of some pretty good successes with calming behaviors with it. It didn’t work for my old extremely OCD dog, but then, nothing did… except lots and lots of training opportunities.
It’s not just one spot. She pulls hair anywhere she can reach-- on her tail and on her feet. The vet checked her for fleas and skin problems and said there’s nothing wrong. She said that Polaris is just very “high-strung.”
You can give anything to a dog if it’s wrapped up in cheese. My dad is a retired doctor, so when we had to give our dog his daily medication, he’d have the pill ready in the balled up cheese and say "Come get your bolus (medicalese for a supersized pill) and the dog would come running. It got to where “bolus” meant “treat”.
I wish it were that easy with cats. With cats, the vet gives you some pills and says, “Give one of these to him every night.”, and you stand there thinking, “Hold on, that’s a dealbreaker right there.”
You’d think so, until you met my eldest dog, Bean. She has an astonishing talent for seperating food from medicine. She works the bit of food around in her mouth until the pill is seperated and then spits it onto the floor. I have never been able to get her to eat a pill on the first try. (She’s smart enough to know that after I get done swearing, I’ll re-wrap it in another treat.) Cheese, peanut butter, hotdogs . . . it didn’t matter. She’d manage to scrape off all the “good stuff” and expell the pill.
I finally got so sick of it that I started cramming pills down her throat. Thankfully, for both of us, our vet switched her to another medication: one that is chewable and flavored.
You’d think so, until you met my dog, who has never regarded cheese as anything other than a wrapper for the crispbread it lays on. She will go to great lengths to avoid getting it in her mouth at any time.
I would keep working on this problem. Do you feed her treats? Could she have a food intolerance? Also, what you think is stressfull and what your dog finds stressfull may not be the same thing. Maybe by keeping a journal for a couple of months you will find a trend. Maybe she’s afraid of someone that visits your neighbor, who knows?
I worry that the chewing will get worse over time and she’ll end up really hurting herself. My dog chewed his toe nails down to bloody stumps. One time so badly that he had blood squirting out with each heart beat. Luckily I was there at the time, he could have bleed to death if it didn’t clot on its own.
As for giving dogs pills I find putting them in a big glob of peanut butter works great. Of course every dog in the house comes charging when you get out the jar. Just give them all a glob with or without the pills and enjoy the sticky show!
The dogs I’m currently staying with get their meds squished into liverwurst. I think it’s disgusting but they love it. One of them can’t ever ever ever have dairy products, unless of course you WANT to endure the gas that produces!
The same dog is on an antidepressant, permanently. He’s doing great with it. Poor guy is a poster child for why puppy mills are bad, he’s so neurotic, but he’s also very sweet.
