Yesterday was all about trust building with dogs at the
Animal Care League in Chicago.
I was pretty excited to be visiting the shelter as working in
this field is something I’m very interested in.
Before I left NZ I googled the Animal Care League and was
looking forward to working with a pit bull (it looked they had a few there!!). We started with a tiny little white
fluffball, just getting her to trust us enough to handle her a bit. A beautiful, fluffy Chow mix followed. He was an absolute sweetheart, and again all
we were trying to do was some trust building and low stress handling. Angus the pittie was next – amazing! He was such a softie. Loved playing tug and had such a soft and
gentle mouth when he took treats. He had
beautifully defined muscles so we could also put some of our recent learnings
to good use by pointing out the major muscle groups. Our final dog was an 8 year old Rottweiler. We’d been told he didn’t like his paws being
touched so our goal was to try and get him a bit more comfortable with
that. We also discovered he had super
tight muscles so was pretty uncomfortable, and that he needed some dental work so that could well have been making him a bit crochety too.
We all know how it feels when you’ve got really really tight muscles, it
hurts right – well it’s the same for dogs.
Hopefully we’ll be able to do a bit more work on him next week.
On Monday night we watched a horrendous dvd which was a
wonderful example of how NOT to handle dogs and how not to massage them.
We were also able to work on a 15 year old dog on Monday who
happened to be passing our classroom on the way to the swimming pool. We gave her a massage once she’d been for her
swim and we’ll be seeing her again next week :)
Today we’re building muscled out of clay…muscle anatomy
makes my brain hurt!!!!
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