On the Loose!
“Distemper is Not Easy”
These are the words of my APA! contact who recently e-mailed to congratulate Japhy and me on our milestone of being symptom-free for [almost] thirty days and successfully taking the DA2PP booster earlier this week. She’s certainly right. It wasn’t easy. Particularly after having lost Mani to Lymphoma... going straight into distemper was a nightmare. Yet here we are. I’m writing this blog post as Japhy is sleeping in his kennel, all fours up and snoring loudly. He twitches now and then, and sometimes chatters his teeth, but if I say his name and he wakes up, it stops. So it’s definitely not virus-related. Our veterinarian thinks that the two cases of random diarrhea that caused me to start our count over were also not virus-related. Puppies eat shit (literally, as you may recall from my last post) and can have sensitive tummies and diarrhea is not uncommon. I put him on a probiotic, and the diarrhea pretty much stopped. Still, I did start the zero-symptoms count over twice just to be sure. So while March 3 is our official “30 Days of No Symptoms,” he’s really kind of finished this count already. Our vet thinks he’s going to be fine. Certainly, she said with confidence, he is no longer shedding the virus (meaning: he’s not contagious). She said there’s a chance he could still develop neurological symptoms weeks from now, “we just don’t know,” but she also said that she personally doesn’t think that’s going to happen. So, Love Dogs, here we are.
*deep breath*
He made it.
On the Loose At Last!
So... we went out to one of my favorite places nearby where nine times out of ten there’s not another human to be seen, and I discovered that Japhy does quite well off-leash. He can run when he wants to, but he rarely wants to. He prefers to casually stroll—something neither Bella nor Mani was particularly good at. They were my sprinters. Race horses. Off-leash, they ran like the West Texas wind blows across the open high plains. Truthfully, the older I get the more I can appreciate a dog who has a slightly slower pace. I don’t know how this will translate to backpacking in the mountains, but we’ll find out this summer. Please note: I also wouldn’t let him off-leash just anywhere. This was a safe space.
We went out and did some lead training as well. I’d let him get out in front of me 10-15 feet and then give him the “heel” command. Considering he’s been quarantined for two months, and therefore hasn’t had the opportunity to train with a big open world of distractions like this, he didn’t do too bad (given slices of hot dogs). We’ve a lot more work to do, but now we can actually do it.
At the end of the day, we came home and he fell right to sleep. We’ve also gone on multiple walks around the neighborhood every day, and he comes home happily tired. This means getting into less trouble around the house, and we needed this oh so badly. HE needed this.
Being stuck at home did force me to be creative and find ways to keep The Boy stimulated. He’s running the agility course better and better every time, and we now have a series of ‘tricks’ that he’s pretty much mastered. We won’t be stopping here. Dogs like Japhy want and need to be engaged and challenged. When we’re ‘working’ he looks at me with such intensity. He wants to feel like he’s doing something important. And while we’re not out on a hunt, or guarding livestock, or pulling a sled, he’s certainly got the genes and the motivation to be a working dog of some sort. Whether it’s a therapy dog, an agility dog, or just a damned good dog that can serve as an ambassador for his breed, he’s on his way to greatness. There was a time when I wasn’t sure if I’d get to find out just how great he’d be. I’m glad that time is over. Here’s to Japhy the Great, the Destroyer, the Survivor, the “the wildest craziest sharpest cat we’ve ever met.”
Here’s to Japhy’s future.