An update and a request…

Hey everyone! Wanted to give you some updates on Duke and his training.

Duke was making progress on his confidence training until about three weeks ago. He is now struggling to follow any commands and has regressed back to being scared of everything in most public places and has also stopped alerting.

Just yesterday, he started to alert but not consistently. Snook is still having to alert most of the time. When I take Duke anywhere by himself, he doesn’t alert so I am having a hard time figuring out what causes him to stop alerting. I thought maybe Snook was the reason he wouldn’t alert. This is incredibly frustrating.

Duke continues to do well at certain places like the chiropractor, church, the quilt shop and bible study. He is choosing to be calm on occasion at multiple places. He even managed not to be scared of the guy who came to inspect the electrical and plumbing stuff at the house. He was skittish at first but the guy knelt down and reached out his hand while saying hi to him and his tailed wagged. After a few minutes passed, he warmed up to him and wanted to be near him as he did his inspection.

I took him to the vet for his regular annual exam and she did some extended lab work as we are still trying to figure out what’s going with him, his yeast infection and other symptoms I was noticing like thinning hair, sleeping a lot more and constant itching. We discovered that the only thing new was decreased kidney function. It is still in the normal range but at the high end. If it trends upward more as we follow up every three months, it will indicate lower kidney function. There is nothing else to cause a medical reason as to why he isn’t alerting or why he has the skin issues and itchiness.

In terms of training, he is not following commands like he used to and his confidence training isn’t resulting in any improvement. We continue to work on that and also practice public access and I see glimpses sometimes of progress or improvement, but I am wondering if he needs more structure and some new activities to work on during training. There is a local program that works on confidence, obedience and public access. The only issue is that it costs $1500 per month and lasts 4 months. Having done structured training in the past, I know he made huge progress and enjoys it. It might be just what he needs to get back on track and possibly be ready when Snook retires in August.

There are two ways that you can make an impact and support us in this process:

1. If you are a praying person, please pray for Duke, his health and for him to breakthrough whatever barrier is working against his progress. Also, pray for me as I work with him, take care of him, struggle to figure out what I need to do to help him and make decisions that impact all of us as we move forward.
2. Making a donation toward enrolling him in the local training program that could really help him become a more confident dog and ultimately help him to pass his public access testing and be put into service when Snook retires.

Thank you for reading this longer post and considering how you can make an impact and show your support for all of us. I will definitely keep all of you posted as this saga continues.