Week 20
Lewi hunting in the dunes
Dorset, and more specifically, Studland, was one of my wife’s favourite places on Earth. In her last week, we took a holiday there so she could say goodbye to all the places she loved. The last place we visited was Studland and the following day she passed away.
Each year since then, I visit Studland on the anniversary, 17th February.
This year I would be taking Lewi. The major problem was the 3 hour car journey each way. Lewi can be car sick on a 5 minute drive. His problem, I am convinced, is not so much motion sickness as anxiety which leads to sickness which then increases anxiety and so on. I have been working towards this trip for quite a time using all sorts of techniques. One was enticing him closer and closer to the car using treats. I had succeeded in getting him to put his front paws onto the bumper to reach the treats; I couldn’t stretch that one step further. The other tip was to lift him into the car and feed him there, then take him out. He would be so frozen with fear that he wouldn’t even look at the food. Gradual conditioning, short journeys followed by a treat such as a run in the park didn’t do the trick either. So I was very concerned. In the end, I got some travel sickness pills from the vet. The drug is called Cerenia and it is purely an anti vomiting pill. The theory being that if we can remove the unpleasant nausea, he can begin to realise that there are some nice things that can happen with cars. I looked up the full details on the net and it recommended that the pills are not taken on an empty stomach and that they are taken an hour before the journey. So up at 6 and a very light breakfast for him (one chicken wing and no licking out my porridge bowl) 7 am give him the tablets. Now I have developed a degree of aversion to giving him drugs, but he is worse than me. First attempt, I pretend to eat them making all sorts of appreciative noises. He sat at my feet staring up at me wriggling with excitement. Begging for some of what I was eating. I popped them in his mouth. They went round and round and out again. Next try, in his food dish with blood from some liver over them, he sucked them clean and spat them out. Finally, I crushed the pills and mixed them up with chopped liver. That did the trick. Three quarters of an hour later, he was sick on the carpet. Still he ate it again so he had the medicine! I just had to scrub the carpet. (Tip for anyone planning to get a puppy – don’t bother with carpets!!)
We set off. A short stop at motorway services for a leg stretch and we were there. He was a bit slobbery but had managed to settle down to sleep for most of the journey.
It was a magical day. As we walked round past the National Trust building and he caught his first glimpse of the long beach stretching out before him he literally quivered with excitement. There were children playing, wide open spaces, dogs, the sea, seaweed, new strange smells, gulls to chase, holes to climb in and dig at, and on top of all that the dunes with the long marram grass to explore through.
He soon decided that he didn’t like the sea. It tasted funny and kept moving. The waves were all of a centimetre high but they got him running. We spent 2 or 3 hours on the beach and up through the dunes, playing with other dogs, exploring and just enjoying the beach. Then it was time to set off. We went home via Swanage where we stopped and had fish and chips on the prom – well Lewi didn’t have any chips, but he nearly had a gull.
The journey home was mostly in the dark and he seemed to have learnt the lesson, that travelling in a car is much better if you lay down and sleep! I’m keeping my fingers crossed here. I have had to do a lot of driving this week, to and from my mother’s and so far, no real problems, he is not happy with it, but does tend to lay down as soon as he is in the cage in the car.