Jaw update

This afternoon we had another private agility lesson with Moe. I'll go into the details of the lesson later, but I wanted to write down for myself what I saw in terms of Dragon's possible jaw pain. During the lesson he was eager to eat (ZiwiPeak, softened by chicken broth, and smeared with chicken fat from a soup I made last night), and we also tugged some with his tennis ball on a string. He was very enthusiastic about tugging. After we got home he was put into his crate while I went out for the evening. He did not have access to his pig hoof at all today, just a plastic chewie and an apple to play with/chew on.

When I returned home I decided to give him his dinner via a training session. We started off with working on holding a plastic tube. This is the same exercise that had prompted me to schedule a vet visit when he was reluctant to hold the tube. I saw more of the same this time. He initially licked at it and opened his mouth slightly at it, but when I increased the criteria to taking hold of the tube behind his canines, he started throwing stress signals. He lip-licked. He licked at the tube a lot. He stood up and didn't want to sit in front of me again to restart the exercise. The one time he did hold it, he set it down very gingerly after I clicked, which made me wonder whether the issue is not pain but just a fear of the tube falling and bouncing erratically. However after I ended that exercise and moved on to other things, he started to take the food less enthusiastically, until he stopped eating. He didn't leave the training session, but he would keep his mouth closed and turn slightly away from the food. I tried lightly stuffing a kong with the rest of his meal and he pawed at it but did not eat any. This really looks like a response to pain. Something that may be an important difference between breakfast and dinner is that this afternoon his food was room temperature (after sitting in the back of the car for the hour-long drive to San Jose) and in the evening I'd just pulled it out of the fridge and it was cold.

I'm going to switch from the ZiwiPeak to some pre-packaged raw patties and canned food. It'll probably be a struggle again to get him to eat enough every day, but it will help rest his jaw. I'll give it a week and then retry the plastic tube.