October 21, 2010

Kaverini Gin, my friend Gin

21.10.2010 Thursday

To make everything easier now that I have a keyboard that's missing the right alphabets, I'm gonna write this once in English. Or as long as it takes to get my new computer. The work computer I had with me here decided to be at the end of it's road.. Good thing to concentrate on blogging for a while and forget about work and stress ;).

Vanilla has been doing really well. I can't even begin to tell you guys how proud I am of that little dog right now. And as you can see from the title, she has made a new friend. A really good one. The first days went well but obviously you can never tell at the beginning how everything goes when more time passes by.. Now these two are really starting to feel comfortable around each other. Vanilla follows Gin basically everywhere and mimics everything possible. They have started to play together.. really play, and that's something Vanilla doesn't do with every dog she meets. The thing both of them enjoy the most seems to be pulling the rope. And oh my, Vanilla totally kicks ass with that! She has perfect tactics and even though Gin is bigger, heavier and won't give up, Vanilla just pulls her around. They can do it for ages and if I didn't know any better I'd say Vanilla's legs are shaking afterwards. She's so wiped out after that.

It has been wonderful to follow how she acts around the new dog. Yesterday evening she was "punching" Gin with her paws, like she did with her sister before. And that was something that usually only happened with Bea (I miss Bea SO much btw!). And when we were coming back from Sierra Buttes (a mountain quite close to Lake Tahoe at the Sierra's) last weekend, Vanilla was sleeping happily her head on Gins back. Like they've known eachother forever. During the walks Vanilla can even go under Gins belly once in a while to get better access to certain smells.. it's been so amazing to watch them. Gin is such a good dog, I can see why Vanilla decided to trust her from day one. And Gin seems to enjoy company as well.. I'm pretty sure if we would just let them play and bark as much as they'd like, they would do that a lot more than right now. But we do need to think of our neighbours.. and the docks are probably not the best place to run and play anyways unless they feel like taking a cool bath. Which Vanilla actually probably wouldn't even mind. But let's not tell her that option quite yet... Mommy doesn't have to worry so much that way ;).

We also met our local vet on Monday. Vanilla got a leptospirosis vaccine and preventive medication for heart worm. How many new diseases when you move away from safe Finland ... Anyway, I had a problem for a few days since the heart worm medicine includes invermectin which it not recommended to any collie-breeds, at least not in Finland, I don't know the policies of other countries that well. And ivermectin has been shown to have deadly impacts on susceptible individuals with doses over 16 times greater than recommended. A few years ago researchers located the gene that causes that susceptibility to that group of chemicals (ivermectin being only one of those) and they have also made studies with Border Collies to see how big of a problem it could be in the breed. So far, in UC Davis only, they have tested over 300 Border Collies and none of them have the gene that might cause these dogs to overreact to that medicine. In a study done in Germany they found one individual out of several hundred tested dogs carrying that gene. The heart worm medication is commonly used in this area since the risk of getting the parasite seems to be greater than the slight possibility of getting side-effects from the preventive medicine. Heart worm really is a nasty one and hard to get rid of. I haven't given Vanilla the medicine yet but I'm probably giving it to her tonight. So let's all hope that everything goes well! Anyway, I think the odds of any symptoms are pretty low; even if Vanilla had the gene, she would have to take a huge overdose to get any bad side-effects. Still I kind of feel that this is one of those battles between the two evils.

All in all, heart worm troubles aside, everything is going great and both Vanilla and me are enjoying the almost summery weather (compared to Finland at least), AND I found a really good dog training club nearby. Now I only need to get in touch with them and hopefully we'll be flying through the agility course soon enough!

2 comments:

  1. Awwwww....vanupalleroooo<3 Haluaa K-O-I-R-A-N.

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  2. Hanna ja pikkutytötOctober 27, 2010 at 12:47 PM

    Bea is already planning a trip to California :)

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