Bunny's One Year Update

- hmm I finally made it. I think it's been a little over a

year

since we adopted our rescue Greyhound

bunny

and I don't want to give you a one

year

update

because a year ago I promised you I would do this and it has been an incredible process and time as you can see, she is a very different dog now she is very happy we are very happy and very lucky to have her but for those of you who watch these videos like back to back when we take her to the next week of having her too quickly a year later I wanted to give you a summary.

I guess from our experience and Bunny's progress they want to hug you, so maybe they're a little wordy, some of you might not know what they are. I'm interested, but I just wanted to do this, so here we go, here's Bunny's one year

update

. I think she's just going to sleep here. It's not that important. The biggest change in money over the course of the year has been his general decrease in anxiety, he used to be afraid of everything in the kitchen, the ceiling TV turns on his water dish, everything outside and now he gladly almost reaches the kitchen if we are there cooking and it will always be in the kitchen if there are treats. so his fear of the kitchen and kitchen noises, as well as ceiling lights in general, has greatly decreased.

A year ago I didn't want to be near the TV at all. She didn't like the sound of it. She wasn't a super fan. if it was crazy images, we would try to train her with rewards and bring her there and try to decrease her anxiety even just by being anywhere in the same room and we would try it with the sound off. We would try it with sound. but the pictures off, she didn't really respond to the training at all, then one time we took her to Big Bear and the TVs there were much smaller and much older and she was in a new environment and decided that suddenly the TVs were a sort of Well, when we got home, she decided that the TVs weren't so bad and she started slowly getting in there on her own terms and spending more and more time in the living room, now that she's in love with Seinfeld, she will do. sit on the couch or the little bean bag chair, roll over there and watch Seinfeld for hours.

She is allowed to be on the couch. A year ago we weren't sure if we would leave her on the couch. We didn't know how she would do with the other one. dogs on the couch all together, she is allowed to be on the couch with Julian, I and the other dogs and even under some supervision, she is not allowed to be on the couch when we have guests, although sometimes she thinks so and jumps up there . and she tries to claim her right, but she is very respectful when we ask her to get off. Julian started to do it, don't slap her leg and say

bunny

, calm down and she is very respectful of the rules of the sofa, which I know can be a bit gray for her.

What do you mean sometimes I'm allowed to be on the couch and other times but she's a really good girl about it and we always lay on her bed or on the beanbag there when we invite her over for one of my favorite moments of all day is breakfast and dinner because sometimes she used to be afraid to eat at first, she might pick at her food if she felt stressed, but now she gets very excited to eat. I know eventually we should probably call this. go down a bit, but when you have a very shy dog ​​that you're trying to get out of her shell, it's absolutely the best thing to see, so we definitely encourage her to get excited at mealtime now, it's probably a bit over the top , but she's just very cute, she's incredibly respectful of the rules we've set for her, which is a nice change from Italian greyhounds who, for some reason, are made of pure mischief, but he doesn't have that streak of mischief in it. we have a baby gate, for example, when we're in the playroom when we're working and it's very easy like you can easily step over it or knock it down, but because it's there, it's incredibly respectful that it's time to stay in this room . and the reason we have that is because, although Bunny is very good at going potty outside, right now she still doesn't always know if she's in a different part of the house and she should come tell us that she has to leave. outside, you know, so we let them all out like a regular schedule, but at times when we would just let her sit in the living room while we were here, sometimes she would just say, "I have a pig," and get up and pee. on the floor and she'd be like a bunny, she's a big girl, she pees a lot, but I'd say she's ninety-five percent good about going potty outside a year ago when we got her, if you watch any of our streams twitch we had to make them like a whole thing that said she's blinking and Julian would have to mute her mic and she says the bunny is barking, we would tire her out as much as several walks a day, tons of play time, tons of just tiring her out. as we could and then every night at 30 or 11 it was like bunny party time, she would get up, get loud, bark, insist that it was like bunny time and we just didn't know what to do, but that slowly. she stopped when she started getting more and more used to our schedule, so now when we're here at night streaming or playing, she just relaxes and that's much better than 10:00 p.m.

The bunny bark time is also the same with the podcast, although she has always been very good with the podcast, she likes to just run it. There's a room that she goes into once a week when we film it and she gets really excited when she sees the door. it's open and we bring her bed in there and she just sits there and relaxes the whole time. She's a very compatible dog with us and she likes to, you know, walk, get some energy out and play a little bit, but for the most part she's a couch potato. and we work from home and were always relaxing so it's nice to have a dog that likes to relax in our room at night too.

She used to sleep in a cage very happily. He liked her, it was her safe place to really enjoy him. Little by little, after a few months, out of nowhere, she started barking at night like 11:00 12:00 1:00 in the morning, like if she got up, she would get restless and just bark very loudly. , as if she left him. I barked, we had the idea, you know, let's just open the door and see what happens and she would come out of her crate, walk around, watch TV, go into her crate, get a little scared and then settle down, so we started sleeping with The door to the box opened at night and every night she liked to get up and walk around for a minute and then come back in, but it seemed to me that she was showing interest in wanting to sleep outside of a box at night. that's what she felt safe about, but it was like building up her courage to, you know, maybe sleep somewhere else and then eventually I started putting beds and blankets around the bedroom to see if she would ever choose a different place to sleep. and sure enough, You know, she could spend like 30 minutes in her bed and then go back to the box and then, over time, she decided that she didn't want to sleep buried anymore.

It was very nice because you know that when he is downstairs he is great, he sleeps on sofas and beds and blankets although he will almost always choose a blanket lying on the floor on top of a dog bed or even the small sofa that we have upstairs or this sofa I don't know if it does hot or uncomfortable but if I had known at the beginning that he wanted to sit on blankets as much as he does, how it saved him a lot of money on dog beds since he simply prefers them. She also discovered on her own when she started sleeping outside her cage that if everyone else was in the bed she wouldn't be in bed, so one time we invited her into bed, not to sleep, but to sit and cuddle, and watch. how the other dogs did many things;

At first, horrified, he said: What are you doing up here? You're too big, the rule is for her, and again she's incredibly respectful of not going to bed at night, not going to bed if you're not invited and it's only in the morning, so right when she wakes up she's very cute depending. what time would we make up, she might bark at us, she wants us to get up or she will walk over here next to your bed and there are a few of them and then she wants to be invited to bed so we asked her nicely because she liked to go up to the bed. bed, he usually jumps in there and just has like, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes of really sweet morning cuddles and he just wants our belly pet and to have a good time and he really enjoys it.

I think that really makes her feel like one of the other dogs, like she's part of the pack. I don't really care what people think, it's so sweet and I wouldn't trade that time for the world, I just think it's so cute, I know there are a lot of people who sleep with their big dogs. I mean, there are already three small dogs in our bed. I don't think she'll ever let him sleep with us in our bed because she doesn't. She really doesn't like to be touched while she sleeps and bothered, it's completely understandable, but especially by the other dogs when she sleeps, she doesn't want to be stepped on and stepped on, and they walk around him and step on each other constantly too a year ago.

You may remember that we had to teach her to climb the stairs, that is no longer a problem, she is very good at it and sometimes she likes to be the first one up the stairs and to be the first one down the stairs, first out through the door means go if you're a greyhound, so every time there's a chance for a door to open, her face is kind of squished, she says she's ready to go. She may also remember that we had difficulty with her toys to protect resources and remind her what a dog's resources are, so if she is a dog.

She is very attached to her food, her bed or a toy, might you know, showing signs of aggression or growling at you, biting you, depending on what you were trying to do. I don't know, she would growl at us like a really nasty open-mouthed growl. She looks at us like this is my toy and you're not going to take it away from me and we work a lot with her to let go or put it down, teaching her that if I take the toy first of all, I'll give it to you, but Secondly, I take the toy, will not go away.

I'm going to play with you at first, that was very difficult and it was kind of hard to work with, but I think the biggest change actually came from building a relationship with her and building. Trust her more than the actual training of letting go or putting it down and now she knows she can trust us. I'm not going to take your toy and make it go somewhere you don't want it to go, the worst. What will happen to her is that she will be thrown across the room so you can chase her and it's even more fun, especially if she takes something that isn't hers, she's out of resource cards, listen carefully, she's slapping her hand. leg or a bunny.

While some of you might ruin the first command we had to teach her was to look at me because she didn't understand that I was trying to communicate with her, Gracie, except that the adoption agency we got her from warned us that they get very attached to their people and anything that smells like you they might be interested in taking and we've heard that you know remote controls or even cell phones are something that if your dog smells it and it smells like you, they might take it. and destroy it, she is not really a destructive dog, she really wanted to destroy, but she will steal your things and hoard them.

Oh, for her, she'll take any shirt, socks, hat, or anything you've left somewhere in the house and hoard it. Usually either on her bed or on the living room floor where she likes to play with her and fuck herself and I know we can stop this by not leaving our clothes in their place but I mean if that's really the worst thing he's going to do. and she's not going to eat it or destroy it, it's really cute and she responds to drop it and leave it, but you know, every once in a while you'll find a whole sweatshirt on her bed and you're like, where did you do that? save it, you may also remember that we couldn't leave the house for more than 20 minutes at a time and she was in her cage.

We make craters when we leave the house the first time we leave the house with her in it. box, she barked so loud that she set off the alarm in her house and for a while it was very difficult for us to set her up and leave her. I watched a ton of YouTube videos on how to alleviate some of the problems. separation anxiety, you know, because she was home all the time, even an hour a day, you know, going to the gym or the grocery store was a long time for her and we had to work until we got to that, so it was like 15 minutes and 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, then 40, you know, we really worked slow, slow and long to build up that time while leaving the house right now, we haven't really built it up in a long time, which I'm sure she's not upset about absolute.

We would give her a Kong toy with some of her kibble, you know, subtracted from her meals with a little bit of peanut butter and we would leave her there with that and at first she wasn't interested, she was upset and over time Charter became her routine and I was excited to eat some peanut butter and I would happily sit there for an hour and a half, two hours. Well, we went to the gym and the supermarket, that kind of thing since then. We have accumulated that time much more andwe feel. much better and she feels much better being her cage if we are not here, which makes me proud.

I worked hard in terms of her relationships with the other dogs. I would definitely say she is more interested in peach. Both girls are very similar in age and Peach is very sweet, so at any moment there are peaches on one of our laps. and Bunny puts her head towards us Peach will give her kisses and she I think is still a little afraid of the size of a bunny when they run and play she will chase Peach and Peach will chase her back a little I think they are still working on their relationship but that's what will probably happen first and fastest.

She's not interested in boys. Okay, he started to become interested in her. The guys are only interested in me and sit on my lap and get the most attention. she's just not interested in them and I doubt they'll ever like being friends, but I think Peach and Bunny have the potential to be little friends one day in terms of their relationship with us. Bunny loves me very much, she is very affectionate, very sweet. She Loves Me. I'm her mom, but she thinks Julian is the best person in the world. They probably have the cutest relationship. She always wants to play with Julian.

As she would, she would be her playmate. If only she could choose someone in this house to play with. It's not Peach, it's Julian, it's not a toy, it's Julian, she'll let him do almost anything, like when he picks her up. I don't know why she lets him do this or any of the things she lets him do, but she. She just thinks he's the best, she wasn't very interested in affection when we got hurt, she just didn't respond, she didn't really make eye contact with you or give you any indication that she was enjoying it, if that was the case.

She also wouldn't give you any indication that she would like you to stop, so we taught her one thing that I called the most, which was that she would pet her and then take my hand away and then shake her hand and then pet her. somewhere they knew she really liked it and then she took my hand away I shook her hand and then she stroked her somewhere and she really liked it again and over time that turned into more and I would say you want more and if she wanted more pets, he would approach her. ask for more with my hand and that way I could know when she was done receiving care.

No, she could just lay her head down or stop groping and then I could leave her alone and if she wanted more, she'd be happy to give her more, I mean. most of the time when you're petting her the answer is more but you know it's good for me to know and for other people to know if she would like to be done with the attention that I'm just going to give her. I'll let you know I'm done for the most part, although I would say adopting a bunny was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

The first months were very difficult, they required a lot of work, there is not much fun time you spend with the dog. "We hope to get there eventually now, all of our days really feel like those days that we hoped would exist one day, now we have them every day, you know, we are not people who have had big dogs in the past and I certainly have never had a greyhound. I've certainly never worked with a dog that didn't have prior experience. You know, just being a dog was a lot of work to desensitize her to everything and you know we still have a lot of work to do.

She's good with people, she's good with dogs, always. She has been since day one, even with strangers coming into the house, we haven't had to worry about it and it's been wonderful, but she also needs a little desensitization, you know the rest of the world, she's great at it. the walks, she still doesn't like trucks, you know something she hasn't seen yet, so if we need more time with her, unfortunately we're in quarantine right now, so we're not working on that currently, but I. I don't think she cares now. I think she's having a great time.

If you just adopted a greyhound, like I said, even that first week we got her, you know, if it was just her, it's actually not that bad because half of her work. It comes from retraining your other dogs, how to coexist with a new dog, a big dog and a dog that has uneven energy, it was very difficult at times, but this has been, I would say, one of my greatest achievements and I know that, Julian, you agree with me on this point. We couldn't imagine our life without her, like she has become such a joy and fun, and I know I'm biased because she is my dog, but I think she is one of the funniest dogs, sometimes she looks funny and just I think greyhounds in general have the sweetest, most charming personalities once they have the opportunity to let that shine and come out when they feel safe and they are very sweet, they are very sensitive.

I just couldn't imagine my life without her since we did this and you know, there were many days a year ago when Julia and I would look at each other and really celebrate our little victories and say, I can't believe she did that thing that I can't. I think she's getting better, you know? And now, looking back, it's hard to remember how hard it was because she's doing so much better and all she really needed was a little love and patience, and she did the rest, you know? Because I don't believe. it was all our training, I think that helps, but it's just a testament to how amazing dogs and greyhounds are and all the change that happened really came about because she wanted to and felt safe enough to do it and she did the work, you already know.

I worked hard taking care of her and trying to give her a safe home, but you know she really came here. I guess if you have any other questions or anything I can answer, I'll do my best to get back to some comments. Either stuff or tweet me and I'm always happy to give any advice I can, although this was just my experience and I'm not a dog trainer and where am I a dog professional? But this has been one of the most positive experiences for us. and I'm just overwhelmed with happiness because we have so much love and joy that didn't exist until we got hurt and now we have all this like she's just great.

I can't imagine not having her and I think all the organizations that adopt dogs like Bunny or any dog. I mean, they did a great job helping us get a dog that was really good for us and we were good for her and we were a really good match. I want to thank Gray Safe, thank you. Guys for being patient, some of our content was a little bit different for a while and you know it's even different now, but thank you for your support, thank you for your advice when I was really struggling during the first few months, a lot of you gave me. great advice, we did it, we wanted to adopt a greyhound and she is just the most wonderful dog we could have asked for and this definitely made us better people and better dog owners and I don't know there is just no process like this.

You really can't describe this this is amazing you are your baby your baby we love you bunny thank you so much darling you know we are so lucky to have you and thank you for being in our lives and thank you for being willing to learn to just be a dog I couldn't be happier and proud of us because we really did it yes you want to be in this David yes thank you all for being patient and for coming on this journey with us and I know looking back a year ago it was hard to imagine that at times I cried a lot, but sometimes it was hard to imagine that if this were possible, maybe she would be a fighting dog for her for much of her life and that That was fine, but you know, I really hoped that she would come back and feel more comfortable and did.

That's a year's update on the bunny. Now he's just a normal dog, almost normal now, still funny looking. Yeah, thanks for watching and I hope this. I gave them closure on the year-long trip we've been on. Yeah, now she's just a normal dog. Whatever. I'll see you next week.