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Originally Posted by kalina82  This is where the drop it/take it game will come in handy.
Ideally you should be the giver of all food and treats for a while but if you don't want to push it with DF then do what you can.
my Morgan is about 5lbs and she is eating Taste of the Wild Pacific Stream. Since Morgan is a good weight I go by what the bag says as far as feeding amount. She gets between 1/3 and 1/2 of a cup of food per day. I have a measuring cup for dog food and use that to measure it out. Even with that amount she usually doesn't eat it all in one day. Its a grain free, high quality food with no fillers so when she eats she is only getting the important nutrients. when they eat food with fillers it just fills them up for a little while and then they poop out most of it. They are not getting enough nutrients from that food so they need to eat more of it. A high quality food will make them poops less, and poop smaller amounts because their body is absorbing more of the nutrients.
Perhaps its Royal Canin Yorkshire Terrier Food | Royal Canin or Eukanuba Yorkshire Terrier Dog Food | Eukanuba.com ? I know they both make yorkie formulas. I don't like Eukanuba/Iams corp so i would never feed one of their formulas even if they were high quality (which they are not). There are people here on YT that do feed the Royal Canin and have great success with. Personally i feed a grain free, by-product free, corn free, high quality food with a good amount of protein in it for my specific dog's needs.
In your case, whatever you are feeding I would stick with right now. You don't want to change anything and further upset her. She's already dealing with a lot. Wait until she's further along in the training process before you change anything else. When you do change foods you need to do it gradually over the course of 1-2 weeks by slowly mixing in a few kibbles of the new food with the old food until you are only feeding new food.
Simple Solution - hang your coats up in a closet or on a door hook where she can't reach it. Put the laundry basket in the closet or on something higher up so she can't reach it. Or get a hamper with no holes in it.
I would crate her at night. This way she won't have the opportunity to be aggressive for any reason. It will also help to potty train her. Her crate should only be big enough for her to stand up, turn around, and lay down in. Any more room and she will use one side as a toilet and the other side as a bed. The crate i have is 24"L x 18"W x 21"H and it comes with a divider panel. Without the divider the crate would be too big for potty training purposes. When morgan was a baby she had less then half of the crate to use because she was so small. I put a bed in there that took up the whole area that she had so it was only a bed area with no room to do anything else. This was used at night time, and while i was not home. I made sure i was never gone for more then 4 hours by coming home mid-day to take her outside. That kind of small space is not to be used for long periods of time (besides night time) so if you are gone longer then that she should be set up in an ex-pen with a wee-wee pad, bed, water, and toys. |
Oh, we hang our coats up out of reach. I was just illustrating her behavior and what she likes to tear up. I would have though shoes and such would be on the menu, but she's good with them. I'm glad, I'd be lost without my Birks...
I'll make sure to look into better food when she's doing a bit better in the working and after we make some headwind.
I have suggested to my fiance to start coming home for her breaks at work and she says it's impossible even though she's only about 15 minutes away. She's in health care and never knows when her breaks will be and for how long. I do understand though, she's pretty busy at work.
Things will be a bit better too when I'm not in school and working a day shift and not have to worry about study groups and work around my schooling. I would home that my fiance would be able to find a transfer to first shift as well to make sure we aren't just meeting in bed and not see each other.
I agree on keeping the night time crating going. Judging by her actions, I'd hate to get the teeth again for shifting in bed - not to mention the sneak attack...
I can't get my fiance to acknowledge though that the dog doesn't need a heaping bowl of food at every sitting. I tried weighing out what she is supposed to eat and then weighing out the same portion for a person by a linear interpolation...1 ounce of food as suggested for a dog of 9 or 10 pounds and 16 ounces for a person of 160 pounds...that's a lot of kibble I would have to eat in comparison!
She didn't see what I was doing there, maybe some of you do?
I then weighed out the amount of food she wants to give her in one sitting, roughly a little over 2 ounces so that would make more than 32 ounces of kibble for a person to eat in one sitting...yeah, that's a LOT of kibble. You have to figure we eat between 8 to 12 ounces of a meat and some side dishes on a full on dinner out an about...more or less pending on who you are...but still, even with a visual tool like measuring out the food she still thinks that she will starve to death.
Any way to help get her on the same page as this? Do you think a trainer would back me up on the feeding issue? Maybe I'm wrong? I have read that over feeding can illicit digestive problems and she could go more in shorter periods of time - which makes perfect sense to me.
Still reading and learning, keep the suggestions coming if you have them.