dirtdorphins said:This is the story of the nail trim, expanded a bit to demonstrate more of the scope…not a recommendation or endorsement of anything, just a true story about one of my dogs, and why I did what I did. They all have a unique story of their own.
I got Logan, a white German Shepherd Dog, when she was about 6 months old. She was a very sweet puppy and seemed perfectly ‘normal’ most of the time, but she had a history of dramatic freak-outs and was already an accomplished fear-biter. She found great success getting her people to stop doing whatever she didn’t like by screaming like a banshee and biting them. They were going to shoot her and just be done with it. She had not been abused *per se*, although she had been admittedly kicked in self-defense and handled roughly in an attempt to ‘toughen her up’. She was fairly well ‘socialized’ with other adult dogs who put her in her place regularly and her life experience was limited to living outdoors on the farm where she was born. Her littermates had all been sold off by 10 weeks of age and she was reportedly unworthy of her bloodlines, for some reason. She was undernourished and food obsessed.
She had the most annoying, high-pitched, yowling scream as if she was being skinned alive the whole way home in the car. She didn’t trust me at all, and had no apparent clue that I was ‘saving’ her from anything. To make matters worse, my GHs really didn’t want anything to do with her and were not very accepting of her. I had my work cut out for me. She had no concept of house-training and a hair-trigger fight-or-flight switch.
Just one example to illustrate: I swear she watched me carry in a bag of misc. supplies and set it on the floor in the bathroom…then about an hr later, she saw it differently. Her switch flipped and she was in full freak-out mode in the doorway, hackles up, snarling, frothing, screaming, and lunging at the ‘intruder’ in the bathroom. Hilarious, really, and I had a hard time not laughing as she decompensated even further when I introduced her to the harmless bag.
Poor thing, I didn’t mean to torture her with life, but I guess that is essentially what I did until she figured it out. I could not take her to work with me, so she mostly lived in a crate for a few months until she learned the house rules and the GHs decided to help train her instead of kill her. I took her everywhere else I could, though, to expose her to as much of the big world out there as possible, *something* every day. We started with just driving around because that was so traumatic. I took great pains to make sure we ended up somewhere fun for her. After a few trips to visit one of her siblings across town (a client of mine paid good money for her brother) she liked the car. Then, in addition to regular yet varied fun, we mixed it up a bit and visited pet stores, farm stores, dog parks, obedience classes, strange neighborhoods, vet clinics, etc., anywhere that would have us. She was consistently terrible and it was embarrassing. We bonded though, and she got better at dealing with new things and acting like a well-behaved and well-adjusted dog as we practiced. Eventually, she actually became well-behaved and well-adjusted (except the food obsession). We made good progress despite my mistakes. It took about a year and a whole ton of no-so-pleasant experiences mixed in with the good ones, but she turned into a levelheaded dog that could handle anything and she never offered to bite another person after the first and last time she bit me.
The ‘nail trim’:
I had trimmed her nails twice before, without incident, so I wasn’t overly cautious. I had just finished the GHs, and Logan assumed her position on the floor. She seemed fine. I rubbed her belly and took a front foot without resistance, trimmed the first claw, moved on to the second, and she suddenly erupted into a violently squirming, screaming, devil and shredded my left hand that was holding her foot. I didn’t let go and she continued to bite, claw, and kick me with wild abandon as we wrestled until I managed to restrain her in such a way that she could no longer move and she couldn’t bite me. It all happened within seconds, but there I was, shredded and bleeding profusely all over this screaming white beast…I was soooooo very angry and I just wanted to put a little more pressure on that neck and choke her ‘til that screaming stopped, but I forced myself to just breathe. Hopi, the bitchiest GH, came over, got right in Logan’s face, and said some sharp barks and low growly things that got her to quit screaming. I tried to talk sweetly and reassuringly to her…repeating the mantra “you’re okay”, which had already become the command phrase for calm down/don’t freak-out, until we both believed it. It took about 20 minutes, which is about the fastest time for recovery after the adrenaline flow of the fight-or-flight response anyway. Then I finished trimming her front feet claws, and then I let her up, gave all the dogs their post-nail-trim treat, and went and doctored my wounds, cried, and cursed. Then I cleaned up all my blood in the carpet, put a muzzle on that dog, tied her head to the futon frame stanchion, and trimmed her back feet claws—all the while talking sweetly, telling her how good and okay she was. When she tried to dance around and take her foot back, I just held it gently until she quit and then went on trimming. They all got more treats and we went for a good run.
Honestly, it wasn’t about the nails. They weren’t even long and I was just shaving the tips. It was about her learning that she was not going to succeed by freaking-out and biting me AND that I wasn’t going to hurt her no matter what she or I did. The next few nail trims, I skipped the shredding part and just muzzled her, tied her short, and did them standing, because I don’t like getting bit any more than anyone else. After that, she offered to lie down and hand over her paws for belly rubs instead, so we went back to doing it that way. And, like I said, that was the last time she ever tried to bite anyone.
In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t used the word ‘okay’ for that because I prefer that word for other meanings…but, thankfully, she didn’t end up having any trouble distinguishing between the two meanings in context, because she became a damn good mind reader, too.
Fortunately, by the time I acquired someone's kids, she had turned into a great dog and folks who didn’t know her history were never able to guess. Well, except that she may have been starved or something, because she really had a thing for extracting any quasi food substance out of garbage. In the end, she accidentally suffocated herself going after the essence of cheeze-puff dust in one of those giant plastic containers after a windstorm blew one in our yard. It still breaks my heart, but in a way, it was a fitting end for her and it relieved me of that obligation to choose her time to die. She was 13 and had very painful hips.
Here are some crappy scanned pics from back in the day
And now it quit raining and I am going to take my live dogs out for a romp
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