Unusually, here’s a photo of Ludvig and me. He actually prefers Ian to me, so given the choice, he will sit on Ian’s shoulder. However, I’ve worked out that if Ludvig is out of his cage and it is just me in the room, if I ignore him – rather than try to entice him over with sunflower seeds, he comes over to find out what is going on.
I’ve just finished a rather spectacular hanging play perch for him. So far, he’s just been ignoring it, but even Ian looked a little startled when he saw it, so perhaps Ludvig is feeling a little overwhelmed by it.
It’s getting to the time when poor little Horrace has to go and get trimmed. Which is a stressful thing all round, particularly for the groomer. So far he hasn’t seen the same one twice, and each time when we take him in they look at me strangely, obviously wondering why I keep warning them about this cute little bundle of fluff, only for us to go back to pick him up to find the groomer looking pale and shell-shocked! He doesn’t like being cold, so it’s unfortunate that we have to get him trimmed in the winter, however the alternative is to bath him, and I think he’d like that less.
He’s passed the two-year mark which is the average life expectancy of dogs with his condition. However, I very much believe that this figure must include dogs which are euthanized and whose owners can’t cope with them. If anything, Horace has improved a very tiny bit. He’s actually started asking for food and has decided he wants a third meal of the day. This is exceptional, as he’s never shown any signs of knowing he’s hungry before, and up till now he has been motivated to eat purely because he’s aware of the commotion of the other dogs and he gets excited because they are excited, and if I didn’t feed him at that time, he wouldn’t eat. It’s been a challenge to keep his weight up, so we feed him on high energy food, but this third meal will hopefully change that.
He still has problems with the physical process of eating, and nothing will change there as he has a loose jaw. He’s also very funny about food and will only eat food he knows. When I change him from one brand of small dog food to another brand of small dog food – which is near enough identical, he’ll pick out only the food he knows. It takes a couple of days for him to actually accept the new food.
But his favorite thing is to cuddle up under a duvet, and this is where he spends 99% of his time – so hopefully he won’t notice the effect of his short coat too much when we do get him trimmed.
We’ve run out of logs to burn, so Ian has been chopping up our old doors. They burn surprisingly well!!!