2010-04-11

Agitation and "Asking"

Today has been a weird day for the dogs.  We have a lot of weird days, but this one involved a lot of sleep, followed by a lot of unstructured outside time, followed by crate time, followed by people hauling large quantities of "stuff" into the house* (which resulted in dogs being outside again so they didn't escape).  Somewhere along the lines Bailey turned into Bailey... and got stressed.  We trained a little bit and as I was getting myself some food she clearly came over and "asked" to be put away.  She's never done that before, except at bedtime.  I saw her looking at Rasza grooming himself, I said her name softly and her eyes were almost pleading when she turned to me, it was quite sad.  She made eye contact and then headed for my room.  She wanted to be away from the cats, from everything, so I just shut the door to my room.  If I crate her and leave the door open, cats/Buzz are likely to walk in and frustrate her while she's in her crate, so I just shut the door.

This isn't the first time I've started to wonder if the Fluoxetine isn't working as well anymore.  She's clearly *thinking* now, and I have a much larger window between observing troublesome behaviors and her reacting, but she doesn't seem to be relaxing like she did when we initially started it.

Poor muppet.

*(I'm afraid to jinx it, because the papers haven't been signed but... the large quantities of "stuff" are ours, from another place that will hopefully not be ours anymore very, very soon.)

2 comments:

Laura and The Corgi, Toller, & Duck said...

I think that Bailey deserves a treat for being a really good girl! She knew it was too much to handle and went were she new she would feel safe and secure. I don't think it's as sad as you're making it out to be. Granted I don't know everything that has occured before today, but I think most dogs would get stressed by people moving a bunch of stuff in. Vito asks to be let into the bedroom (alone) sometimes when he's tired, and Lance likes to go into his crate when he's stressed or tired.

Anyway, I really hope that everything is still going well with Bailey and I'm sorry she had an bad day.

Megan said...

I suppose I do need to focus on the fact that she remained within her brain and DID ask, rather than react to everything. I just get so caught up in it sometimes... thanks for pointing it out!