Gracie has been on Fluoxetine (an anti-depressant) for two weeks now. Didn’t want to post about it until it had had a chance to kick in all the way and we’d had a follow up with the vet. The good news is that pretty much right away Gracie started improving. I think the medication is helping her think through things more, so she’s not just reacting right away. It’s shortened up her distances considerably, and she’s now able to go on walks through the neighborhood without going red*. We still have a lot to work on, but this has really given her a chance to help us help her build a foundation for the training we’ve been doing. Without the medication we were seeing improvement, but we weren’t getting a lot of traction in certain situations. Gracie is super smart, and part of our problem was she was learning the behaviors like tricks, but when it came to real life situations she wasn’t really using them. The medication has made it so we can start to work on the behaviors more outside of a classroom setting.
There’s side effects of course. Her appetite has definitely decreased, but she’s also been in heat, so that could be affecting it as well. She also sleeps more, which I’m not thrilled with. She was already ridiculously good at settling around the house for a young Belgian, and the medication has pushed her energy levels down well below what they should be for a dog of her breed and age imo. That said if you get her up to do something like training, hiking, or swimming she’s ready to go. The vet also said that because of the training we should be able to wean her off this eventually.
*For our training we use a scale of green, yellow, orange, and red to describe how Gracie is doing in a situation. Green is completely chill and not stressed at all. Red is for when she’s not thinking, and just reacting by barking/growling/lunging/etc. Red is when it’s pointless to train and you just get the dog out of the situation as fast as possible.
