Thoughts on Kaylah from this morning

• Kaylah sat when I asked her to before breakfast! She now sits sometimes on command if she's looking directly at me when I speak to her, especially if I gently tap her butt as well.
  
• I tried soaking Kaylah's food overnight with pills in it. That's how I get our little dog Terra to eat her pills. I knew from yesterday that Kaylah likes soaked, mushy kibble. However, Kaylah refused to touch the whole bowl of mush when it had pills mixed in. I've received two helpful recommendations from other Fluffy Dog folks with more pill-feeding ideas:

1. Advice: Make a little meatball with canned food and put the pill inside. They usually swallow it without chewing. Or wrap the pill in thin lunchmeat. --> I tried something similar next this morning. I took slices of sausage and put a pill in the middle. Kaylah at the first one in one gulp. However, she then carefully chewed up the remaining ones and spit out the pill. Clever girl. Hmmm. Maybe I'll try the sticky canned food idea, too.
   
2. Advice: Get a pill grinder from a drug store. Grind all the supplements and mix with 2 Tablespoons liverwurst and 1 Tablespoon yogurt. Pop any liquid capsules to mix in, too. Fold this paste into the kibble. Add more liverwurst and yogurt as necessary to disguise the taste. Apparently grinding up the pills helped another foster mom. --> This sounds like its worth a try as well. Thanks for the tips.
3. Finally, I talked with the doggie daycare that had Kaylah for the past week. They found something that worked: they mixed Kaylah's pills in with grain-free canned dog food, but not with her kibble. She ate most of that. They then gave her dry kibble mid-day, and then more pills with canned dog food again at night.
   

A blog reader asked for more info about the bike attachment for exercising dogs. We have two different ones, a Springer and a Walky Dog. You can often get them for much cheaper online than from the manufacturers directly. Here's more info about them:

• Springer: http://www.springeramerica.com/
  
• Walky Dog: http://www.thedogoutdoors.com/dog-bicycle-accessories.html
  

Notes about Kaylah's hearing from the rescue: "Often dogs "shut down" when they are adjusting and this will be displayed by ignoring you. On the other hand, it would be good to test her a bit by clapping your hands etc behind her head and see if she turns." I do think that Kaylah can hear dogs barking, so she doesn't seem to be deaf.

Today as my husband opened the door to leave for work, Kaylah bolted. She raced all the way to the other end of our cohousing community's shared backyard and then ran around the side of a building. We ran after her. Luckily, when she saw me running, she ran over to see what I was doing. I squatted down and called her, and she came right over, and I snapped her leash on. Phew! We'll have to be more careful now that we know she's an escape artist! Our dog Bear used to be like that, too, but we've trained him not to do that anymore using body blocks and making him sit until we say it's OK to go out.