Heaven and Hell

Wow, I can’t believe it has been a month since my last blog entry. So much has happened. I’ve just had four whole days off and I feel reenergised and ready for the next block of work. Work has dominated, it seems like, every waking hour and crept into my dreams at time. There had been highs and lows with Bea my rescue dog too. On a positive note she is 95% recovered from her fear issue around dogs again. As long as I am careful about not walking her down narrow paths which means dogs come straight towards her she is fine. Still a little anxious but choosing to come to me again, instead of bolting away. The real drama has been a mysterious lump which appeared on her neck recently. She some how managed to cut herself and by the time we got home a short time after a huge lump had appeared under it. I’m 99% certain it wasn’t there before the injury. The vet the next day took a needle stick biopsy and prescribed antibiotics in case it was an abscess. This seemed to work and it was a real shock when two days later the diagnosis was a mast cell tumour, which is one of the really nasty ones. I queried this with the vet as the lump had all but gone and she rechecked it the next day. After another chat with the pathologist we think it was a massive inflammatory reaction to the cut. We are waiting for the scab to come off to be sure but I’m feeling much better about it now. I’m using homeopathy to aid the healing process and it seems to be improving daily.

So that was the hell bit. Heaven of course is always the amazing people and animals I have been working with. I was invites to the Dogs Trust Open Day over at Newbury back in June and had a busy afternoon chatting to dog owners which lead to me seeing several as clients. I’ve worked closely with the centre for many years and teach regular staff training days as well as receiving referrals from them.

My demo with challenging dogs at the beginning of July was amazing. I had more people than ever attend and we had some very positive changes in the dogs. One owner emailed me a few weeks later to say she had seen a big difference in her dog’s behaviour and she was confident she would be able to work through the remaining issues.

My absolute heaven has been working with the keepers at Paradise Wildlife Park in Broxbourne. I’ve never meet a group so open to learning about the work and loving working with the animals in their care in a different way. They were eager to try it out on many different species including raccoon dogs, pigs, skunks and birds. One keeper even wanted to try it on one of the leopards. How do you work with one of the most dangerous cat species in the world? The answer is very carefully! Tellington TTouch Training really can be applied to any species and for zoo animals that may be instinctually fearful of human contact, ttouch can really help with stress and rapport building. We also talked about rearing young and recovery from injuries. I hope they see a good result and I’d love to do more with them. In the evening I gave a talk at the Big Cat Experience event at the park. The talk was a success and I had queues of people who wanted help with their animals after. If you get a chance to go to the park, its one of the good ones and well worth a visit, the website is www.pwpark.com

What’s next? Time to do some more writing I hope and I have a two day course to put together for a TTouch hydro course I’m running in the autumn and a number of articles to finish. Then it’s a full on season of workshops and demos to finish off the year, oh and of course the book launch  for The Truth about Wolves & Dogs. I think I need a lay down just thinking about it all.