It took Dakota about 24 hours to learn he could use his paws to steady the collar while grabbing the inner seam in his teeth. Once he had a good grip on it, he was able to pretty much shred half of it in 30 minutes. Since the vet said we needed to keep the collar on for 5 days, we had to find a solution.

First we tried replacing the E-Collar with an inflatable Pro-Collar. That worked great for several hours, but he eventually found a position in which he could scratch the injury on the top of his head.

Necessity really is the mother of invention. I took what was left of the E-Collar and trimmed it to a width equal to the distance from where his regular collar sits at his throat to the end of his snout. I then threaded his regular collar through both the Pro-Collar and E-Collar with the E-Collar inside the other one, loosened his regular collar a notch and slapped it on.

That got us through another two days and then he figured out he could crack the collar by ramming it into the furniture. Three or four strips of duct tape got us through another day.

Then his sister Kisa decided to play tug of war with it and it was all over. Fortunately, this was shortly before our vet visit so we didn’t worry about it too much.

Take two small squares of bread, coat them with peanut butter and slap them together with the pill inside.

Not recommended for pets with allergies.

When we had spaghetti for dinner a few nights ago, I was reminded of situation we had with Kisa and Larkin many years ago.  Bread is one of their favorite treats — so much so that when we took them to McDonald’s, they’d eat the bread first, fries next and meat last.

Anyway, we got in the habit of giving them any bread left in the bread basket after dinner.  Trouble was… they always knew it would be coming their way and were so distracted by the bread basket they wouldn’t eat their own dinner.  Knowing that dogs cannot live by bread alone, we had to figure out how to curb this behavior.

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