I know that not everyone wants to know this, but it is important to my story. See… I am PMS’ing this week. My PMS is brutal. My husband wants me to get on medication for it, except they can’t put me on medication for it (I have adverse reactions to birth control and all those warnings that they say women shouldn’t be or do when they’re on the pill… I do or am almost all of them).
This is Mugen’s second run-in with me on PMS.
I love my puppy, I can’t count how many times have I logged on to the off topic threads on the MINI forum to gush about some innocuous and cute little thing that he did. Any other week out of the month, this dog is awesome. But not this week.
It started two days ago. Mugen started chewing at a spot in my carpet nervously… it was almost compulsive. So I corrected him with a firm no, grabbed the lemon juice and moved on. But he kept going back to the same spot and eventually I had to crate him, clean the carpets and reapply lemon juice. This was not a fool proof method. I don’t know why he is obsessed with this spot. I’ve thought about duct taping it, but I think he would try to eat the duct tape.
Flash forward to yesterday. I got out of bed and he was seriously bossy with me. I’m not entirely sure what was going on, but it took him 15 minutes to settle down and give up the crying so I could get him out of the puppy pen after my shower. Perhaps he senses that I know he has outgrown the puppy pen and he will be moving to his crate for overnights this weekend?
After this, for the entire day, he nipped me over and over and over again over a period of several hours, until finally I hit the stage where I was done. I gave him a firm “Enough!” and then got up and left the room to hang out with my hubby. Mugen responded to this by following me and biting my foot… hard. My son had to come into the room and scoop him up and take him out of my sight for a few minutes because I was just furious. We have done this a hundred times, he’s never bitten me before. Why now all the sudden?
So, after I calmed down, I sat down with the family to watch some TV before bed and Mugen would not let up. He began systematically attacking my legs while I was watching the show and eventually ended up tearing two holes in my pants and left a bruise on my thigh and this is when I looked at my husband and son and said, “I’m leaving… our dog has a death wish.” So Viola and I took off to DQ.
He was his normal self after I came back. My son was in the front yard with him and he said that I was exuding negative energies (yes, he’s been watching the Dog Whisperer) and that I need to be more careful because Mugen feeds off of these energies.
I just shook my head and said, “If he wants to live, he’ll get used to it.” I could almost see the comment on my son’s face which said, “If HE wants to live? What about us!?” but he didn’t say it.
I just shook my head and went back inside.
Hey there RG! Uh, he’s not fixed yet is he? I think the most simple explanation is that he’s reacting to your hormones as any male dog would. Granted, he’s a puppy, but like all boys/men, they start sometime. So what he’s doing is trying to show you that he’s the big male alpha dog and you’re his bitch (I mean that in the nicest of ways). He does this because that’s what dogs do with members of their packs. You might want to try to think like his dam might think… growl at him, a light swat (not a hit) on the nose, “snap” at him as if he were your actual pup and he was pulling this. As for the carpet… try cayenne. Just sprinkle it in the carpet, he’ll get a snozz of it when he goes to chew. Don’t dump a whole lot, just enough to give him a warning. In fact, you might want to sprinkle a touch of water on it after you’ve applied the cayenne, so he doesn’t sneeze and get it in his eyes.
As for you and pms. I’ve got similar issues. My ob/gyn suggested Estroven, which is a natural OTC hormone regulator. In my case, I have very low estrogen issues, so I needed to up my estrogen ~ which the Estroven has done and made me & my monthlies more tolerable for those around me. Ask your ob/gyn and get a hormone level test to see where you are. Just a suggestion…
Hey V! Thanks! No he is not fixed yet, I won’t be doing that until his growth plates close… 1 year to 18 months, ish. I thought he might be reacting to my hormones, but some people say it’s way too early for dogs to be aware of those sorts of things… and then some other things I have read say that dogs figure that stuff out at 9 weeks of age. I’ve been trying to assert myself as you have suggested… but right now I have so little control over my anger that it took a lot out of me yesterday to be able to get up and leave the room without just.. yelling and screaming and throwing things. My PMS is really brutal this month. I can’t seem to find a good way to take the edge off so I can function without being… a complete jerk.
I will talk to my doc about it. Maybe there is something they can do after all. My husband would like to survive my periods without me yelling at him for no apparent reason. I don’t think that’s an unfair request on his part.
LOL.. RG, my husband was at the point he would disappear once a month- and what’s worse, was I knew what I was like but there was no way to control it- a raving bitch one minute and in tears the next. I hated having so little control over my emotions. I mentioned it to my ob/gyn and he immediately ran hormone level tests- this was about a year after the twins were born (I had problems getting pregnant too). Found out that my estrogen level was unusually low (like 49, most women feel comfortable at 100 or more). So he suggested the estroven and told me to start with the lowest dose for a couple of months and then adjust as needed. I’m now able to self adjust based on how I’m reacting (I’m also starting to enter the change).
I think animals are more aware than we give them credit for- even children are effected by our hormones- when I was nursing my kids, I could always tell when my moon was coming because my kids would start getting fussier…
That story was priceless and left me in such stitches!!! LOL!! Love Ya Stacy!!