Rat Terrier, Rat Terrier

What is it about bathes that are so bad?  Dogs will go into the water on their own, but if you start the tub they go running.  Ella hates bathes!  The second I move the curtain in the bathroom she hides under the bed.  Its actually kind of funny.  I fill up the tub and then wait 15 minutes or so and by that time she has forgotten about it so she comes out and I can grab her.  She acts like I’m beating her, but hey, she needs a bath!!  It’s not really that bad.  It’s warm!  Maybelle doesn’t really like bathes either.  She isn’t as dramatic as Ella is, but I can still tell she doesn’t like them.  She doesn’t run and hide either.  She usually just sits there and stares at me as I run the water.  Ella’s coat is really thick so it takes FOREVER for her to dry.  The second she gets out of the bath and I open the bathroom door, she goes running around like crazy, jumping on the bed and the couch.  She’s not stupid.  She knows that I sleep there and if she has to be wet, so does my bed.  Maybelle does the same thing.  Sometimes, I think they plot with each other.  Maybelles coat is a lot thinner so I can get her pretty much dry by rubbing her down with a towel.  Good for the bathes, terrible for the cold weather!!!! Sorry…no bath pictures.

I’ve already showed this I think, but this is ella on the electric blanket.  I guess she’s a little warm so she needs to sprawl out to cool off!

Ella on the Laundry!!

The couch with the heating pad

I may have already mentioned this, but my dogs don’t really like to be cold.  Then again, who does?  It all started with my mom.  When she got her dogs, she had a couple of pet bed warmers for her plants (my mom is a plant freak).  We bought our dogs these houses and dog beds and made them dog baskets.  They are really spoiled!  She put these pet bed warmers in all of the dogs accessories.  They were always plugged in.  This may not be safe, but the dogs sure don’t mind.  Whenever we were over there, all Ella did was lay in these areas.  For christmas last year, Ella asked for a heating pad and she got one.  I put her heating pad on her couch.  Unfortunately, it has an automatic shut-off.  I can’t find one without and automatic shut-off!!!  It is really annoying.  When I got maybelle and it got cold, I decided that maybelle needed one also, so I went and bought one.  It fits perfectly in the new bed I just got her!! I’m so excited.  I also have a heating blanket.  This was supposed to be for me because in one of the houses I lived in we had the heat set at 62 degrees because no matter what, it never got warmer in there.  Our bill was still over $300 dollars.  Anyway, I used it a lot that year and, of course, Ella loved it too.  That is not automatic shut-off!  I haven’t broken it out this year because our apartment is quite toasty if needed, but it is still cute to watch ella chilling on the electric blanket.  Another quite annoying thing ella likes to do is jump on top of my laundry after I take it out of the dryer.  It never fails that when I dump them out of the basket she come running and burrows herself into a spot to sleep.  If I don’t take them out of the basket, she just jumps into the basket.  So, all of you that have dogs who hate to be cold, I recommend a heating pad and an electric blanket!

We’ve had Ella for the last 2 holiday seasons, and this is our first with Maybelle.  I usually always take them with to our families when we go.  It takes them a while to get used to a new place so they usually end up following me around the house the whole time whining, trying to make sure I don’t leave them.  We aren’t at my families house long enough for them to get used to everything.  Plus, I think maybe all of the people might make them nervous.  This year, I have been at my Grandparents house for a couple of days.  I think they’re pretty much used to being here now.  They will play and do their own thing with me not in the room.   It might have something to do with my Grandma giving them bags of treats, but I don’t know.  They tend to migrate to her now, and will follow her when she goes somewhere.  Its kind of cute actually.  This year, I have to lock them upstairs because my cousins baby is allergic to dogs.  My Uncle is coming today too and he has a boxer and a shit-zu.  Those four locked together upstairs will be a good combination!!  I feel bad that they don’t get to enjoy the holiday feast with us.  I know they would love to be scavenging the tables, waiting for somebody to accidently or intentionally drop something off of their plate.  I guess its probably better for them since they’re already gotten more treats in the last couple of days than I give them all year round.  At least they’re having a good time!  

I love little dogs.  I had 2 big dogs (shelty and a dalmation) when I was growing up.  I think the little dogs are more affectionate, or else maybe everybody is more affectionate to them.  One of my big dogs used to sleep with me, but then after a while she didn’t anymore.  Ella always sleeps with me and Maybelle usually does.  Some nights she’ll sleep on the chair, others in the bed.  They always sleep in the same spot on the bed, and they always have to be touching me in some way.  It is really kind of cute.  Ella burrows underneath the blankets, and Maybelle sleeps right by my shoulders, she doesn’t like to be completely under the covers.  If I am sitting on the couch studying and I have a blanket over me, Ella will always jump on me and want to go under the covers, Maybelle will lay somewhere on top of the covers.  I come home and Ella is usually lying on the couch under the blanket or in the bedroom under the covers.  Maybelle just greets me at the door.  It is so cool how dogs have their own preferences and their personalities are so different.  People might argue with me, I know some people who say that dogs can’t have "preferences", because its all based on rewards.  That may be true to some extent, but watching them, and the ways they are so different and the different things they do even though I treat them both the same and give them both the same things, make me think differently. 

If anything happened to my dogs, I don’t know what I’d do.  That may seem excessive and some people may be thinking that I’m crazy, they’re just dogs.  To me, they’re not just dogs.  They’re actually part of my family and I treat them as if they were my children.  That’s the way I think of them anyways.  So, today, I got up extra early to finish my Flash project for class because I really hadn’t had much time to do it the last couple of days.  I took the dogs outside a little after 8:30.  They both ran out after the squirrel like they usually do.  They peed and then we usually take a short walk.  Today, Maybelle started on our walk and got to the end of the leash and I lost a handle on it.  It’s a plastic 16′ retractable flexi-leash.   It fell to the ground and I think the noise scared her.  She took off running as fast as she could.  I called her, but she couldn’t hear me or something.  By the time I ran to the end of our driveway, I couldn’t see her anymore.  I was so upset!!  I walked trying to find her.  I didn’t think she’d get very far.  Some guy told me he saw her running in the road a little ways up.   He took me up the road a little and I got out to look for her.  It was actually pretty far away from our apartment.  I could not find her anywhere!  I was really really upset.  I walked as fast as I could back to the apartment, hoping that someone had found her and called me. Sure enough, there was a voicemail with some guy telling me he found her.  She was a little over 2 miles away.  She wasn’t even gone for 15 minutes!  I went to a woman’s house to pick her up.  When I got there, maybelle was obviously upset.  The woman said she was bleeding and that she wasn’t walking too well.  She wouldn’t come to me, so I went to her and picked her up.  I looked at her paws and saw that she had torn the pads off of all of them!!  The front paws were worse than her back ones!  I was even more upset at this time!  I got home and called the vet and they got her in immediately.  I got there and he cleaned her up and put bandages around all of her feet.  She tried to bite him and the tech when he was putting the bandages on her front paws.  She has never done anything like that before, so she was obviously in pain.   The vet said that her front paws were the worst and that she was very lucky she wasn’t hemorrhaging.  He said dogs paws are very vascular and have a lot of nerves in them.  Then, he gave her two shots, an antibiotic and something for the pain.  I brought her home and she laid down in her basket.  At this time, she seemed a little better.  I went to get a rawhide for her and she accepted without hesitation. 

I feel really really bad!  I think that its my job to protect her and, obviously I didn’t do a very good job today.  She could have been hurt a lot worse than she is, but she is still pretty beat up.  She’s slept all day, which is probably a good thing.   I just hope her paws heal fast and that she doesn’t get any infections!!  Oh yeah, and I’m really sorry for missing class today! 

Maybelle was so timid at first!  It took her a while to get used to us.  She was also still recovering from having her puppies.  She was pretty thin, her skin was very dry and her coat was very thin.  The first month or so she slept in the kennel.  She didn’t know how to jump up on the couch or the bed.  She basically pulled her way up.  Despite all of this, she attached to us quickly.  She would walk up to me and lay on my lap or just want to be touched.  As time went on, she got more and more comfortable around the apartment.  Her hair started to grow back, her skin got better, and she gained some weight. 

   Obviously, as you can see, she discovered this chair and she sleeps on it almost every night. 

It took her and Ella a little while to get used to each other.  They had an argument the first 3 hours Maybelle was here.  Then, about 2 weeks later, they were playing outside and something happened and they both started attacking each other.  I pulled them away from each other.  Ella was really scarred.  She ended up with a bleeding paw.  It wasn’t really bad, but I could tell that Maybe had bitten her entire paw by the mark and where it was.  She had teeth marks.  After this, they never fought again.  Ella slowly began to trust her and soon, she would even sit on the same furniture as Maybelle.  When we ride in the car, they will both sit on the front seat next to each other.  This is really exciting for me because I was kind of worried that with Ella’s aggressive tendencies, she may not be able to accept another dog.  I was really happy that she did!

Ella was born February 13th, 2004.  Like I said before, we got her on March 13, 2004.  At the time, we lived at 414 S. Mills St.  It is this big, overpriced old house that lets all of the heat escape in the winter time, which caused our heat bill to be in the upper $300.00 every month during the winter.  Yeah, and our thermostat was set at the scorching temperature of 62 degrees.  Thankfully, the snow was just starting to melt when we got Ella.  Anyway, the point of this was that we weren’t really supposed to have a dog.  We hid her for the following couple of months. Next we moved into an apartment at 22 S. Charter.  It was a pretty decent place.  Very small, and the heat bill wasn’t as much.  We weren’t really supposed to have a dog here either, but we convined Madison Property Management that she really was no bigger than a cat (which she’s not) and, really, she is just like a cat (they allowed cats).  So, they let us have her.  We moved out of that place over a year ago and the apartment we are in now is quite bigger.  It is big enough that we decided that we needed to get another dog.  My Fiancee nicely agreed as I made him a list of reasons why we should get another dog.  He said we could as long as it was bigger than Ella.  I called the woman we got Ella from and, amazingly, she had a larger dog that she wanted to "find a good home for."  She had used her to breed, but had trouble selling the puppies because they were too big.  Apparently, people want smaller dogs now??  Anyway, she was going to give her to me for free as long as I got her fixed.  No Problem, I would send her the money right away.  I called her a couple days later to confirm and she told me that somehow, she was pregnant again.  DAMN!! I had to wait 4 months to get her!!  I guess that was okay. 

So, time went by pretty slow and April came.  My mom had decided she needed another dog.  I drove down to Ohio with her to pick up this new puppy.  I also got to see my new dog. The breeder had named her Bella.  This was kind of weird since my first dogs name is Ella.  So, I saw her, and I wasn’t so sure about getting her.  She didn’t look bigger and I really didn’t know if I liked her.  It didn’t matter.  I waited 2 more months and then sent my Finacee and his brother down to get her.  They brought her back and she was so cute!!!!  She was very shy and she didn’t want to get out of the car.  She had spent most of her life on a farm, so the city was kind of different for her.  We got her into the house and Bella and Ella smelled each other out.  3 hours later, they got into a little tiff.  It okay though, no blood spilled during this fight.  After that we decided we had to rename her.  We had been discussing this for months now, but we couldn’t figure out what to call her.  My finacee started calling her Maybelle (pronouced maybel).  So, June 3rd marks the arrival of Maybelle.

When you get a dog, you don’t realize how much care they need.  I loved the idea of having a puppy.  I loved to shop for her, and still do!  I love to play with her and she is mostly well behaved.  What you don’t realize are all the other things you have to do.  Its amost like having a baby.  I don’t think I can count the amount of times I’ve had to pick up her poop, both inside the apartment and outside.  Sometimes, when she gets sick and she can’t hold it in, she goes to the bathroom all over the house.  If the smell doesn’t disgust you, the sight of it does.  I have also had to clean up numerous puking incidents.  This isn’t quite as bad as cleaning up the diarrhea, but it is still disgusting.   Then, like a baby, sometimes they whine constantly!!  Ella will sit there and look at me and just whine.  Sometimes she’ll walk around whining.  I really don’t know what to do for her then.    Sometimes she needs to be taken outside.  Of course, they constantly need to go outside!!! Sometimes, its in the middle of the night in the winter time when its cold and snowing.    Of course, these are all just the bad things.  I don’t want to deter you from getting a dog.  There are plenty of good things about dogs!!

I had 2 dogs growing up, a shelty and a dalmation.  I remember being so excited when we got them!!  At first I played with them all the time, but after a while they never wanted to play with me anymore.  I never really thought about it until I got Ella.  I had never had a puppy before!  (the other dogs were almost a year when we got them)  Ella loves to play and she is small enough that she can sit on my lap and stuff.   She especially loves to chew on rawhides (and really everything she can get her teeth on) called Dingoes.  I can’t help getting her a toy and a package of Dingoes every time I go to the store. Sometimes I will even make special trips just to get more Dingoes.  My fiancee gets kind of annoyed with me for this, but I love to buy the dogs things!   I have to compromise and agreed…No floofy things.  Does this count?? 

I was driving one day and I noticed a fenced in area along John Nolan Drive.  We lived on South Mills at the time, so one day I walked Ella there.  It was a dog park.  I was so excited!!  I found out that there are about 20 dog parks around Dane County.  Most of them are just large fenced in areas with trails.  They all vary in size and popularity.  I went to the one by the alliant energy center for a long time until my Fiance went to one in Verona.  This one is huge! It takes at least 45 minutes to get around the perimeter and it is a great workout for both of us.  Plus, there are usually a lot of other dogs there.  We started going to dog parks frequently and Ella handled herself pretty well.  She hasn’t attacked any other dogs….or kids….so that is good.  She is kind of lazy on the trails though.  I think I give her too many treats.    She currently weighs about 16lbs.  She is probably about a pound overweight so we’re working on it, but she’s still cute!!

So Ella and I enrolled for puppy school at PetSmart.  It was once a week for 8 weeks.  We started when she was 6 months old.  It was a basic class, teaching her to sit, stay, lay down, walk properly…that kind of stuff.  It was mainly to build a good relationship between the owner and the dog.  Besides puppy school, my fiancee and I did other things such as making her wait to eat, making sure WE went out doors before she did, we didn’t let her on furniture until she was invited, things like that.  Basically from all of the research I did, I learned that Ella felt like she was the Alpha Dog of the house.  She had to protect us and put us in place if we got out of hand.  At first I really scared.  I didn’t know if we would be able to ever change this.  After a while, she started to change. We would test her every now and then by taking things from her.  There came a time when she didn’t bite us.  I was happy because I thought this was working, and I guess, it was for us.  The problem came when I went home for the summer. My mom baby-sat my cousins, who at the time were 1 and 4ish.  I don’t remember the first time it happened, but I quickly learned that Ella felt that she was superior to them.  It was really scary!  I would be in the other room and all of a sudden I would hear this loud snarl and growl and then my cousin would scream.  She bit them a couple of times, but thankfully it wasn’t as bad as it was when she bit me the first time.  Besides the fact that I thought my cousins would be traumatized, I didn’t want to have to give up my dog.  Luckily, my Aunt and Uncle understood the situation, all though I do not blame them for disliking her even to this day.  I kept working with Ella and, I guess it paid off.  She hasn’t bitten anybody since 2004, Christmas Eve.  I think she just needed to fully trust us and know that no matter what happened to her, we would protect her.  She is a completely different dog than she was when we first got her.  I am still a little nervous sometimes when she gets around kids, especially the little ones that just walk up behind her and "pet" her on the back.  They consider their slap to be nice.  I was really surprised when my little brother who was 1 at the time, walked up to her and started hitting her with one of his plastic hammers.  She didn’t do anything!  Now that we had "cured" her aggression problem we could start doing the fun things!!