he still eats both meals with out hesitating every day. they day he snubs his nose at food, ill know something is seriously wrong. he has never ever snubbed a meal. ever lol.
this is Maddie, totally!
Maddie is 11 now... and other than all of the white on her face
lol, she doesn't look OR act her age
She's still got a ton of energy. Actually, she's had a burst of it lately and has been reverting to some of her puppy naughtiness :nono: But her joints are good and the vet says she's in great shape, no signs at all of arthritis yet. She's still game for hikes or swimming, and she still
needs that daily walk or intense game of fetch or training to keep her chill for the night. She's a demanding little brat if I skip it.
I am super aware of ever wart, lump and bump, but not panicky about it. Just observant. What I am panicky about, at times, is her eye. Since her accident and she's 100% blind in the one eye, I am always worried about the other one getting cloudy or her losing vision in it. But I'm not as bad as I was
Thanks too Tara the blind and deaf cocker I fostered a couple years back.
I also do bloodwork twice a year, with a full senior panel, but we've been doing that because of the meds she's on.
What has been a harder adjustment for us is her hearing loss (she's almost totally deaf now), it felt somewhat sudden to me, but I think that's because I missed a lot of the early signs because she's a big faker. When the vet confirment that she is almost 100% deaf I felt my stomach hit the floor...
The adjustment was hard because here's a dog who's had a reliable recall, and was rarely ever on a leash in safe places, and now she has to be leashed 100% of the time, she's even taken a fancy to being a door darter and taking off
the brat. So we had to work on that, and reinforce the hand signal for "wait" But other than that, we're fine. I always did hand signals with the command so there's no change there. Other than the initail getting her attention... when I tap her on the shoulder she'll look at me. But sometimes she will deliberately look away from me when she doesn't want to do something... LOL...I'm trying to teach her to look at me when I flick the lights, like I did with Izzy... but training for that has been slow going so far. If I stomp on the ground she'll look up, if she's not sleeping.
Speaking when she sleeps, she sleeps deep and hard. Like, dead ferret sleep (when she's not snoring). And thank goodness the ferrets taught me about that, to avoid the heart attacks on my end! My mom was not so lucky :rofl1:
Just the other day when we were cuddling I said "I had to wait 11 years for you to be this cuddly! It was totally worth the wait!"
I really really do love it!!!!