Jonah has been doing very well. He is out and about the house without a leash or tie down about 90% of the time. He has tried to initiate play with the cats a few times (they were not pleased) but is overall not really that interested in them and mostly ignores them.

We are still regulating how much Frankie and Jonah can get in each other’s space. They continue to try to step on/climb on/sit on one another so we do have to continually watch them, but we are slowly beginning to trust Jonah.

We must continue to monitor the water bowl interactions and are in the process of figuring out what additional things to try to help Jonah stop guarding water.  If anyone has any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Water is a difficult thing to manage when dogs guard it, because you can’t restrict access and you can’t completely remove it. We are considering putting down an abundance of water bowls to help him realize  that it is not a commodity in short supply. That could go one of two ways–it could help him and we could slowly remove water bowls until we only had a few out OR it could help him generalize his guarding behavior. Because of this potential effect, we haven’t yet decided what to do.

He recently started some short-term anti-anxiety medication and it seems to help him feel more comfortable in our house.  He is being put on a longer term anti-anxiety medication (Prozac) to help lift the weight of his fear off of him and allow him to learn.  The Prozac should start kicking in within the next month or so.

Note: Jonah is thin but he is not emaciated like he looks in this picture–he must be breathing in or something. But anyways, I promise he is not a skeleton.