No More Stitches

Holly had her stitches removed from her belly yesterday, plus her anal glands expressed.  Oh boy did she come home a happy camper!  She did a few zoomies around the yard and visited every angle of every corner.  I had to break up her fun after a few minutes because she continues to be on limited activity.  With the gastropexy they recommend a 21 day limitation on high exertion and excess playing.   She was tired after the little bit she did get in – she will have some ground to make up once she starts going full bore again.  Her limitations have produced more kennel time but not to say she has been alone.  Kooper, Keltie, Rainie, Lana and DeeAnn have all been over at various times to visit.  Keltie has been kind enough to rotate kennel time with Holly so she could have some head scratches and belly rubs too. 

Duluth has been getting a lot of snow this winter, indeed a recording breaking snowfall amount for December and on path for the same in January.  My backyard likely doesn’t have one flake that hasn’t been displaced by a dog but the quantity of snow is still there.  Holly’s fence jumping episode was after the first snowfall and now that we have had a second dumping, I am concerned that she will take liberty again.  There are people & dogs two yards to the west and Donna, John & Diane just next door to the east.  Holly takes interest in going both directions.  I thought about snowshoeing or shoveling along the fence line to make a gully but neither felt like the best remedy.  Then I happened to see news footage of a prison camp with barbwire along the fence top.  I didn’t want to go to that extreme but I did substitute with using cedar branches!  There has been two piles of cedar branches in the backyard ever since the first storm of the season, a spring project to remove them!  Today they were unpiled and spread out along the fence, nature’s own version of barbwire.   I had to wrestle Holly for the branches and continually replace a number of them that she felt belonged in the middle of the yard but in time I had the fence decorated with cedar branches.   The branches create enough distance where she is reluctant to  jump over a branch plus a fence, and she’s not able to get good footing on the fence rail to hoist herself over.   I could use a few more on the back end of the yard.  Next storm will provide those.   If this doesn’t work to deter Holly from jumping the fence, it might still work when it becomes a deer buffet line.  Holly is scared of deer so if she sees them lined up eating the cedar branches, I suspect she is going to hang out in the middle of the yard.  Regardless, it gave both Holly & I some fun exercise and playtime today.  That in itself was worth the effort.