I have had my cat, Nora, for over three years. She recently made the move with me to my marital home, and is finally warming up to my husband, so it finally seemed like we had the green light to get a puppy.
Last week, we got a mini dachshund which we named Dexter. He is a dapper dappled doxie (say that three times fast!). The runt of the litter, he weighs a mere 1 lb 13 oz at 9 weeks of age. We are working on crate training, and switching his dog food over. At first, the switch was going well, using 75% of the old brand, 25% of the new. Yesterday, we changed it to 50-50%. There began the problems. The POOP problems. At first he just would not go, not at all, all day.
Then, at about 8:30 last night, he started going pretty regularly. In his crate. And it was really runny. To the point where he could not control it or let me know he needed to go. The vet told me to expect this, as the old dogfood was such crap, and the breeder was feeding him adult formula of the crap, as opposed to puppy, so me feeding him the much healthier, richer puppy formula was going to take some adjusting for his tummy. So, we cleaned. And cleaned. And CLEANED. The whole scenario culminated in an emergency 4 am bath for a very smelly, very sad little puppy. You could tell he was so ashamed that he was making such a mess in his crate.
During the bath, his "sister" Nora was so concerned, she hopped up on the side of the tub to make sure he was ok. It had taken her a few days to warm up to him, so this was a big breakthrough. After he was all clean, I dried him, and laid on the couch with him, to make him feel better. Nora promptly snuggled up on the couch with us, a MAJOR breakthrough. We napped for several hours this morning, and despite all the chaos and smell and mess leading up to it, it was the best sleep I had gotten all week.
No comments:
Post a Comment