Winter Worries – Whole Dog Journal

January 7, 2020 Kar-Bay-Inc 0 Comments

My “very mixed-breed” dog, Otto, turned 12 years old at some
point in the past couple of months. For a big dog (currently 72 pounds), that’s
getting up there in age! And he’s got some health issues that I have to stay on
top of – a benign mass on his liver that we are monitoring, lipomas that have
just started blooming in size and
number in the past year, and molars that keep fracturing and needing removal
(despite the fact that he doesn’t chew on anything hard – no bones for this guy
for years). He also has a very
subtle, intermittent limp on his right front leg, particularly when he first
gets up in the morning.

The good news is that he’s still as mentally sharp as ever, and still getting around well. He can still jump into my car, and will still jump into the back of our truck if the tailgate is down and we happen to walk by it – just in case we were going somewhere for the kind of fun he associates with the truck: paddleboarding, fishing, hiking, camping. I don’t take him on long hikes anymore, because he gets way too stiff and sore afterward, and I don’t want him to tear something when he’s fatigued. He still stays ahead of me and my friends on our regular two- to three-mile off-leash walking routes and is only a little stiff the next day. But it’s hard to keep from hovering and fretting.

Communicating with a deaf dog

This week and next, I’m caring for a friend’s 14-year-old
small dog, Leila, while my friend visits family in Europe. Leila has stayed
with me and my dogs before, but it’s been at least six years or more; she’s a
very different dog at 14 than she was at 8 or so – solidly deaf, for starters. She
still chases her tail and barks when she wants attention, skips around when
it’s mealtime, and her eyes are bright and happy, and her vision seems good!
That’s fortunate, because what’s new to me is that her habitual gait is quite
slow, and she sometimes stalls out and stands still, not sure if she wants to
go with me and my dogs as we travel the 100 yards or so back and forth between
my house and my detached office building on our fenced property.

I’m in the process of figuring out what sort of body
language and gestures encourage her to come along. We’ve established that she
does not want to be picked up, and
that she will definitely hurry along if I happen to make a treat available from
the depths of one of my jacket pockets. She can trot along, and will for a
treat, but left to wander around the property without a destination in mind,
she sort of shuffles and snuffles; she’s enjoying all the smells on my
property, that’s for sure. But I think I will recommend that she see her vet
about something for what looks to me like arthritis pain.

Hoping for many more good years

Observing Leila at 14 is kind of ramping up my anxiety about
Otto at 12. How much time do I have before Otto has mobility issues, or can’t
hear me? This is stiffening my resolve to diet-and-exercise away those extra
two pounds that now appear on the vet’s scale every time Otto weighs in. He’s
already great at physical cues (without a verbal reminder or co-cue), so we’ll
just keep practicing those.

The cold temperatures just add to my worry. My last heart dog, Rupert the Border Collie, passed away (at 14 years old) in the winter, and so many of my friends’ dogs passed away in the winter, too. I’m so relieved that, even though winter has officially just recently started, we are past the solstice and the days have started getting longer again. We still have many cold days ahead, but at least we’ll have more light.