Alice

Ellen Sespaniak Attachments Nov 7, 2018, 10:02 PM (4 days ago) to me Hi Kathy Alice is very sweet and loves it here at home. Her foster had told me she wasn’t fully pottty trained and was still peeing in her crate, but she was fully potty trained when I got her and hasn’t had a single accident in the house or in her crate. She is very sweet, but she does have some serious behavior issues that I wish I had been made aware of prior to adopting her. She is very loving and sweet with me, but she has anxiety issues and is very aggressive towards other people. My mom is afraid of her right now and she tried to go after my boyfriends friend who stayed with us a couple of weekends ago. I had to put up an indoor pet fence to separate her from him the entire 4 days he was here. I also had one of my friends over recently and she was also aggressive towards her as well. We tried having my friend sit on the couch quietly and we ignored her and she seemed to calm down and was doing better than with my bfs friend at first, but then she started barking and growling again. I did some research on obedience training and spoke to a couple of places and was told that she would need some advanced behavior training to help with the aggressive behavior. They recommended her be boarded with them for 2 weeks where she would get trained full time and would then be taken out in public to get her socialized and comfortable being around other people. They also told me due to her breed and anxiety she may still bark at people but could be trained to where she would stop if commanded to stop. I’ve been taking her to the Justin Bartlett vet next door and brought this issue up to them when I came in this past Thursday for her lepto booster shot. They gave me a prescription for trazadone and seemed to feel it would help her more than if I were to do the advanced training. She’s only been taking the trazadone since Thursday, but so far it doesn’t seem to be helping as she’s still barking and growling at other people. I scheduled a follow up appointment in a few weeks, but if she’s still having issues in a week then I plan to call and see if I can come in sooner to try finding another solution. That being said, when she is in a situation where she’s in a public setting and there’s a bunch of people around, her anxiety kicks in rather than her aggressiveness. She will begin shaking, become extremely clingy, and wants me to pick her up. This was how she was when I first met her at the rescue center. I spent at least an hour with her and she was very shy then eventually loving and warmed up to me. When we’re at home she’s her comfortable, playful and loving self. She’s warmed up to my bf and cuddles with him, but still acts shy around him sometimes. For example I will be playing with her but sometimes if he walks into the room she’ll stop. Other than that she loves playing fetch and running around outside in my yard. I have a large fenced in property so she loves it and gets plenty of exercise. Alice is a very sweet and loving girl and so I’m doing my best to try to work on her issues. My dog who passed was from a kill shelter in Tallahassee and they were planning on putting her down that day as she too was aggressive, had been abused and wasn’t doing well at the shelter. She would bark at people at first when they came over but would stop when I told her no and would be sitting on their laps and be best friends minutes later. She’d get to know my friends and get excited when they came over. She was a wire hair jack Russell so she was highly intelligent and I didn’t really have to train her, she just understood and learned things quickly. Alice is an entirely different breed and so shes been harder to work with, especially since I work full time, but I’m doing everything I can to try to work with her on these issues and haven’t given up. In my opinion I think her anxiety and aggression issues stem from the fact that she hasn’t been completly desensitized or socialized. I will continue working with the vet to try finding a solution to her anxiety issues, but if you have any other suggestions besides medications or if you know of any classes that she could enroll in to work on desensitizing her I would really appreciate it. If I can get her desensitized and help her overcome her anxiety then I think it will be much easier to work out her aggression issues and get her socialized.