The Honest Courtesan

Axel is definitely settling into life at Sunset.  As I’ve written before, I’ve been reducing his medication by 50mg/day every week, and now we’re down to 100mg/day.  Last week I tried to give that to him in one bedtime dose rather than splitting it into two 50 mg doses at bedtime & midday, but that left him a bit too exuberant in the afternoon and evening, and he tried to chase Speck a couple of times.  He immediately stops when I say “Leave it!” but I want to get him to the point where he doesn’t chase her at all, so for right now I’m going to hold him at 50mg twice daily until the end of January, then I’ll try to nudge it down by 25 daily mg a month until we can get him off of it completely.  On at least 5 or 6 occasions in the past week Speck has trotted through the living room right in front of him with no reaction beyond his perking up a bit, even without my saying anything, so I think we’re on the right track.  I think it helps that Trip, whom he seems to look to for guidance, does not have any issue with cats, but we’ll see; unfortunately, Trip has this weird habit of occasionally running up to Jonathan and barking at him for no apparent reason, and as of Sunday Axel seems to have picked up that habit from him.  I’m not too worried because Jonathan just stands there and looks at him like, “What the hell are you on about, dog?” and he’s much too big for the dogs to hurt.  So one thing at a time: “Don’t chase things smaller than you” is much more important than “Don’t irritate things big enough to stomp on you”, because the latter tends to be self-reinforcing.