It’s so amazing how well Kaiju does when Paul clips his nails these days. It used to be such an intense event that we dreaded. It often accompanied with Shiba-screams and a full-force resistance. Kaiju was so scared and he would fling his head around so hard it hit our lips which sometimes swelled up and bled.

What brought this wonderful change in Kaiju’s attitude towards nail clipping? This video made by wonderful Dr. Sophia Yin (who sadly passed away recently). Kaiju was just like this dog in the video (at the beginning of the video) during his first couple of years with us. If you are having trouble, try following exactly what she does in the video.

We owe her so very much.

I heard humans open MY drawer (it’s filled with my treats), so I came running here. I’ve sat, and been a very good dog. But instead of giving me the yummy bully twist, they’ve placed it on the edge of the drawer, and walked away to go back to whatever they were doing before.

I know it’s my drawer, but it still is very suspicious. I want the bully twist so much, but I just don’t know what I can do to get it.

Staring and whining normally make one of the humans come and help, but it hasn’t worked.

They look over this way once in while, laugh, and say “You can do it, Kaiju!” and that’s it.

I’m so lost. All I want is this thing to fall into my mouth. HUFF!

Update from Humans: Kaiju eventually managed to drop it onto the floor in front of the drawer. We were in the other room, so we don’t know how he did it. We just know it took him about half an hour. We saw him come running to us happily with the bully twist in his mouth. We gave him the biggest cheers we could give.

soooo i peed on human bed while they were in another room. i don’t even pee in g-pa’s backyard. they’re worried. my new nickname = peebuddy

was too scared to go 100 feet away from home to pee, just now. i don’t need to pee if i have to go that far. i’ll just hold it in.

Raiden, Knox, Dakota, Cody, Jewels, and our Kaiju got together at a big dog park in the afternoon.

It was “Round 2” for Knox and Raiden, who had not-so-friendly “Round 1” some months ago. It was before neither of them were neutered. Their humans looked forward to and felt very nervous about this re-match. They even planned to let the pups meet outside of the park and do a walk together before letting them off-leash in the same space.

Well, none of that was necessary. Raiden and Knox sniffed each other and went straight into carefree happy chases and wrestles.

Kaiju has not improved so much in terms of his inability to walk in most public places without being very scared. He’s still on medication, and he will be for a long time.

What has changed recently is that we have sort of given up on doing regular walks, for now. After Dr. Dodman (our behaviorist) told us not to force the issue, we’ve stopped asking Kaiju to go once around the block, which we insisted before in the mornings and afternoons. Now, Kaiju only goes out for quick potty breaks. At night, we no longer take him to long walks in our residential neighborhood. Instead, every single night, we drive (10+ minutes) him out to a park for an hour walk. It’s not a big park, so we make multiple rounds sometimes, to make it an hour. Kaiju loves this park. He runs around, gets the craziest zoomies, chases rabbits, runs around with dogs if we encounter them, mostly in the dark.

Basicaly, we’ve stopped trying to make him “better”. For now, we focus on giving him a fun and safe life. We do ask Kaiju to take extra steps to go some extra feet every morning, with the help of good treats. When he feels good, he does, just for a few minutes. When he does not, he stops and looks back towards home. Then we go home.

Now that we are giving him practically no pressure, his body language during morning and afternoon potty breaks are noticeably more relaxed. We hope that the quality of life for him has gone up considerably also. One thing for sure. The quality of our (the humans’) lives have definitely improved. We are not in despair nor stressed at every single walk. We are not sure how long we will continue this, but for now, we are all happier.

Rice cooking sound really freaks me out. I tried to escape and whined loudly. But then I scored some cheese. That calmed me down. A little.

During our long walk in the park, We put a piece of chicken jerky treat on this bench. It’s a very high-value treat for Kaiju.

We gave him about 3 minutes.

In the end, he decided that he’d rather not have the treat if it meant he had to grab it from the bench.

Oh well.

Kaiju hasn’t been doing well in his scarediness department for the past few weeks. The routine walks that were slowly but surely getting better suddenly worsened. He had not trembled for a long time, but now he sits and shakes staring away from the direction we want to go.

We contacted our behaviorist, and she gave us a go on upping the dosage of his daily medication. So we’ll try that. We will also give him a complete break from routine walks during weekends. Instead, we’ll drive him to parks, just like we did this weekend.

He’s a happy camper at home. We had a guest last weekend whom Kaiju had never met before. He got used to the guest quite fast, and ended up pestering him for treats, like a normal dog.

We take comfort in the fact that he is comfortable and happy where he spends most of his time.

This past weekend was both really fun and stressful for Kaiju. We took him to fun places. We also took him to where we knew he wouldn’t do so well.

The visit to my workplace on Saturday was the first of those iffy places for Kaiju. There was nobody there, though, and although he clearly would have rather not been there, the visit was brief (all I needed to do there was to pick up something I forgot on Friday) and he did not have any freak-outs.

Fido Factor iPhone app then helped us find the near-by dog-friendly state park to visit. The place was great. There was no fenced-in area, but the open field was far away enough from any streets that we felt okay about letting Kaiju off-leash to play with dogs. Kaiju loves dogs and sticks to them, so when they are there, we don’t feel too nervous. Kaiju was a very happy camper.

On Sunday, we watched Kaiju play with Pudding the Shiba and other dogs at the dog park in the morning. Perhaps because of the more pleasant temperature, Kaiju played for a long time and more constantly than usual.