1. A doggy door.
I tell everyone to get a doggy door. Very few take me seriously because they think it's a safety risk or a hassle or just something from the 1990s that people just don't do anymore. Well, you know what a hassle is? Letting your dog outside. And letting him back in. Multiply by more than one dog. Make one dog completely deaf so you can't even call him and just have to wait for him to wander back to the door. Have two separate doors the dog could use. Then you're guessing what floor the dog will be on, the upstairs deck or the bottom patio. Better yet, don't have a fence at all. So then you're standing outside with a dog multiple times a day just...waiting.
I heard on a podcast about pet health once that the more decisions a dog gets to make, the more active his brain is, the healthier he'll be, and the longer he'll live. Something to think about! We make all the decisions for our pets. Letting them choose when to go outside is the least we can do for them.
I was going to talk about this months ago but I'm reminded, with Mav being in a cone and not able to use a doggy door, just how advantageous they are. Poor Scout has suffered the consequences of not having a doggy door this week, but it's also been really cold so we took it out altogether this week.
We had a doggy door in Colorado, toward the end of our time there, maybe last two years we lived there and it went into a fenced-in yard. We put a doggy door right into the side of the house in Missouri, it leads into an extra office area near the garage. A doggy door, I learned, means you don't need to worry about "being home to let the dogs out". Isn't that always the complaint about dogs? That they don't do their business in a box in the middle of your house (gag) like a cat? A dog can also, it follows, get as much or as little exercise as he feels like getting that day.
So when we moved into this house, we immediately started wondering how we were going to solve this problem. Turns out, we have two sliding doors, one onto a deck, and then one from a walk-out basement. We don't *need* two sliding doors I guess, so we bought a temporary doggy door that installs in a sliding door. You measure, order, and lock it into place. Now, the door can be locked just the same as if it's were regularly sliding shut, because the kit comes with a locking mechanism, but then the door isn't functional unless you unlock it. So, this particular type of doggy door isn't for everyone! But we had double access to the backyard through two different doors so we could make it work here.
2. Prozac.
There's a lot of talk about how SSRIs just don't work. It's the placebo effect, they say. However, I know that they work because we put Scout the dog on Prozac and he turned into a different animal, for the better. Since about 2021 (age 8) he's had crazy anxiety. Started with storms and then with being left alone and, while I just kind of sucked it up and dealt with his destructive habits in Missouri, when we moved to Kansas, I could not deal with it. Trazodone is the go-to to calm down dogs but they also build a tolerance and you can't take it every day for that reason. We've also done CBD oil and pills in the past, so we have tried every natural route we could imagine over the years. He is not neutered for multiple reasons and vets said that was the only way to change his behavior but was not a guarantee. By the time we came to that recommendation, he was 10 and it's risky to do elective surgery on older dogs.
I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but I finally asked the vet back in June if there was anything we could give him, because humans can take SSRIs, why can't dogs? And she was like "uh, yeah, of course he can". I have no idea why this is gate-kept from pet owners. He's 12 1/2 and there's no changing his habits now!
So we started him on Prozac this past summer. He takes it every night and, the first few weeks, he slept like all day long but now his body has adjusted and he is the best dog. CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH if you're struggling with an anxious or destructive pet. It's been about 5 months, so I wanted to get this recommendation out there to the masses because I didn't know it was an option. Otherwise, we would've done it years ago. It costs about $10 a month, depending on where you get the prescription filled....the vet, Chewy, etc.
3. American cheese.
A lot of dogs take medicine and a lot of pet owners buy pill pockets or have all kinds of creative ways to get the pills down. We've tried them all, trust me, over the last 13 years.
This is foolproof and has worked on all 3 of our dogs. That's admittedly a small sample size but let me know if you try it.
You use sliced American cheese. You take a small piece and you putty-it around the pill. The dog will gobble it up. Scout takes 5 pills a day and it works every time.
It's kind of funny because with Maverick being sick the last two weeks, we were like wow, that Scout looks super spry and healthy! and then I'm like Let's not forget, that dog takes 5 pills a day to keep him that way (two heart medications and his SSRI).
Anyway, those are my current favorite dog hacks...any to share???
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