Stress

The overall stress level in my house lately is just ridiculous. The fighting, the barking, it's just insane. Friday night Jun and Elo got into a fight over nothing. It's not unusual for them to get into fights, but most of the time they break it up fairly quickly and nobody gets hurt. When they don't, Jun ends up with a hole in her face, and the one she ended up with on Friday was the worst she's ever had. Bad enough that I took her to the emergency vet. They recommended antibiotics but said stitches weren't necessary unless I wanted them for cosmetic reasons. I did, but I didn't want to pay what it would have cost, so we left with our antibiotics.

This morning Lok wandered near Jun and she proceeded to bite him in the face 3-4 times. Thankfully she has great bite inhibition, so he wasn't injured. But I hate when Lok gets picked on. He never deserves it. Of course Jun's "fight" with Lok drew Elo's attention and he decided to join in. Thankfully I managed to separate them before they got to each other.

And the barking. OMG. The second I step out of sight to leave for work Jun starts in. As soon as the door clicks shut, Lok starts in. And as soon as Lok starts barking, Elo starts howling. It is ridiculous. Insane. I feel bad that Lok and Jun are upset and that they all have to listen to each other. And I'm sure the collective stress level is just adding to the individual stress levels. It's a vicious circle and I can't seem to keep ahead of it.

And I am not sure what Elo's deal is. He is just wild lately. I think I've been spoiling him, so it is back to boot camp until he remembers how to act like a trained dog.

Jun is on the second attempt at Clonidine. The first time she seemed to be having an agitation response so we lowered the dose (I was out of town for a weekend) and now are building it back up. She is at the same dose where we left off last time and so far seems ok. Yesterday she was very sleepy. We did some CC yesterday and got extremely lucky to find a lone soccer player in an empty park. This scenario (one person, lots of upredictable movement) would have been a HUGE issue for her in the past, but she was only mildly concerned, then unconcerned. In the past we would not have been able to get far enough to calm her and would not have been able to move closer. Yesterday we closed the distance by half. In addition, two people walked by on the walking path at the edge of the park (another huge trigger) and barely got half a glance. It was a pretty big deal, but I'm not getting my hopes up. As I mentioned, she was very sleepy and not really herself. That is not the long-term effect I am looking from from a drug. If the sleepiness went away and the increased threshold stayed, that would be amazing, but we will see.