Introducing Snickers

This is our new (semi-permanent) foster dog Snickers! She is a 10 year old smooth red tweenie (maybe 15 pounds). She comes from large hectic family with six kids and she spent ten whole years of life with them. One day they up and decided that they didn't want her anymore. Can you believe that? How do you not fall in love with a dog you've had for ten years?

Apparently they were keeping her mainly in the garage and the backyard. But that's enough about where she came from. Now she's with us. :)

She is just absolutely sweet as can be. She's a little nervous when she first meets folks (proubably undersocalized as a puppy, but then again Gauis was socialized like crazy and he's not a fan of new people. So perhaps its just a dachshund DNA thing). She's still better with strangers than Gauis. She just wants to sit in your lap.

She pretty much ignores other dogs large and small. She's sniffed Gauis a few times but that's the largest interest she's shown. She also ignores the cat! So good news all along. Her only issue is that she is VERY sensitive to handling. She yelps at absolutely everything. I'm used to Gauis who is pretty rough and tumble so I have to remind my self to be extra gentle with her if I need to pick her up, or move her. My not sure if it's a medical thing, just old age, maybe arthritis and some back troubles that lots of doxies have in old age. But she seems to preemptively yelp. So it might be behavioral. Just a defense mechanism to having a bunch of little kids around. An early warning system if you will. Well we will put her on supplements for her joints and I'll see if clicker training will desenstive it a little bit. Other than that, she's crate trained (sorta), and housebroken. She also LOVES to sleep in.

Right now, we've haven't really done much training except for some it's your choice. She has NO idea what impulse control is.

My only other struggle with her is switching her off the kibbles and bits (first ingredient corn... yuck) onto the royal canine I feed Gauis (first ingredient chicken). She'd rather it the junk food, but we're working on it. She sure likes table scraps. (Shhh... don't tell her but we're trying to get her to lose a few pounds. Get her lady figure back)

She also needed a bath. PHEW!

Gauis got one too.

P.S. Snickers is an awful name isn't it? I was going to change it... to Beverly... we were going to call her Bev.... but when she got here I called "Snickers" and she turned right around. Which means she recognized it... which made me feel guilty about changing it... Which I know is all in my head. It's not like it would have traumatized her, or changed her identity. But I just couldn't do it. I totally could have changed Zeus' name. He had NO idea Zeus was his name.