Mini-Monkey and The Sensory Deprivation Restaurant

We’ve had Daisy home with us now for over 10 days. Things are going incredibly well, and we’re besotted with her.

In many ways she’s becoming Monkey’s very own “Mini-Me”. Every (dry) morning he goes out onto the patio and pauses for a moment to give the garden and the farm field opposite a visual survey. He stands heroically, chest out and nose raised, and right next to him there’s a little 3.7kg pipsqueak copying his every move. He then goes down into the garden to carry out a painstaking perimeter check and his understudy is with him every step of the way.

Give Daisy a treat and there’s a pretty good chance she’ll play with it for 5 minutes before eating it – just like Monkey – and when she scratches, she generally stands on three legs instead of sitting down, another move she’s copied from her mentor. Their bond grows deeper every day; Monkey gets into a bit of panic if he nods off or gets distracted and loses sight of her, and they both sleep more soundly when they’re side-by-side in their crates in our bedroom.

There are really only two situations where we generally step in to avoid anything going wrong; the first is during play. Both Daisy and Monkey really want to play together, and the type of play they most want is chasing, but there are problems with that. If Monkey leads the chase, Daisy gets so fired up to follow him that she could do something silly like like leap off the patio and hurt herself. Conversely if Daisy leads the chase, Monkey sometimes forgets himself and begins treating her like Poppy, and Daisy gets overwhelmed and runs for shelter. That sounds worse than it is; Monkey’s really gentle but he moves abruptly, springing from one position to the next, and Daisy was very sensitive to sudden movement when she first came to us. If I saw her getting a little too close to the edge of the patio and quickly moved to block her, she’d cower; if kids saw her on a walk and ran up to meet her, she’d freeze and pee herself. Thanks in no small part to Monkey she’s getting used to sudden, rapid movement, but she still gets in over her head sometimes and we step in accordingly. That said, Daisy is a cheeky little girl who will bend the rules to win. One one occasion she started play but sought refuge under one of our garden chairs when the Monkey juggernaut got excited. He screeched to a halt in front of the chair looking thoroughly confused, at which point she darted out, kissed him on the nose and shot right back under the chair.

The second step-in situation is where Monkey has something, and Daisy wants it. Monkey is incredibly tolerant of girls nicking his stuff; as an adult Poppy used to do it all the time, but Daisy is a little pup who’s unafraid to test boundaries and we don’t want this to tilt into bullying, or to push Monkey so far that he eventually has no choice but to tell her off. At the same time, Daisy has to learn to respect other dogs, and Monkey has his part to play in this. As it turns out, Daisy seems to be quite good at taking cues from Monkey, but when she seems to be ignoring them we do intervene. Hopefully we’re getting this right.

We haven’t quite had them cuddling up together for a nap yet, but Monkey invites it very frequently and often chooses to lie close to Daisy, so it surely can’t be far away.

As I noted in the previous post, Daisy was a bit reluctant to eat her food at first. My first thought on seeing this was that she was taking a leaf out of Beanie’s playbook; she’d sensed that I really wanted her to eat and was testing out her humie leverage options. Eager to get her eating but just as keen to avoid being taken for suckers by Beanie 2.0, we went as far as changing her kibble, but we also made that kibble the one and only food item available to her. That helped, but she still wasn’t as eager to finish her meals as we’d have liked. After observing her carefully Susan felt that Daisy wasn’t pulling a Beanie on us, but was just distracted and overwhelmed by the exciting new world that had opened up to her; she just needed somewhere calm and free of distractions at mealtimes. We designated the spare room as Daisy’s personal “sensory deprivation restaurant” and served all Daisy’s subsequent meals there. It didn’t work brilliantly at first, but then we hadn’t quite implemented the sensory deprivation aspect well enough; there were a couple of dust bunnies under the bed and these made the most excellent play things – far more fun than chowing down on kibble. Also more fun than kibble was biting exercise bands, running round the bath and limboing underneath my homemade “landmine” bar. Once we got these things out of the way her eating became much more reliable and she now chows down without hesitation.

OK, I should also confess that we bought some wet food pouches and mixed these in with the kibble.

In the lead up to Daisy day we made the rule that no matter how cute Daisy might be, Monkey must never feel that she’s hogging the attention. In practice there’s not much danger of that; Monkey is behaving so well towards Daisy that he’s constantly getting showered with extra cuddles, praise and treats, and of course he still gets one-to-one attention on longer walks because Daisy’s not ready for them yet. I’ve also taken him on a couple of special missions to Pets At Home, the first of which was finally to clear out the remaining bags of Burns food left over from Beanie & Biggles, and the MCT-laden Neurocare that we got for Poppy but never really used. It turns out that Pets At Home take food donations – individual cans and pouches as well as kibble bags – and get them to Blue Cross who look after pets that don’t lead the same lives as pampered Beagles. It seemed very right that Monkey should be with me as I took those bags in, and he behaved impeccably well in the store; while I was concentrating on steering our heavily-laden, wonky-wheeled flatbed trolley round to the charity drop-off point he could easily have pulled on his lead and raided the shelves, but he didn’t, not even once. I’m immensely proud of our boy, and its wonderful to see him truly happy again now that we’ve got Daisy.

Side-by-side hoof chewing makes for a quiet, contented evening