I’m pleased to report that Axel is completely off of the trazodone which the shelter had him on. When I first got him at the end of November, he was on 400mg/day, an immense dose for a 20kg animal. So I immediately started weaning him off, at first reducing the dose by 50mg/day every week, then once we were down to 100mg/day slowing the reduction to 25mg/day every few weeks. At the end of April he was down to 25mg/day, then for all of May 12.5mg/day, and then at the beginning of June I started skipping days between doses; since I saw no difference in his behavior between med days and no-med days, his last dose was a week ago, Monday the 22nd, and he’s just fine. He no longer chases the cats or snaps at strangers, and he isn’t nearly as high-strung as he was just a few months ago; about the only relics of his former problems are a tendency to eat cat shit (I know it isn’t an unusual dog behavior, but I’ve never owned a dog that did it before) and some separation anxiety. He no longer gets upset when he doesn’t see me, unless I go off in a car; when I get back, even if I’m only gone for a couple of hours, he cries and runs around when I return until I pet him and calm him down. Given that I was told his first owner died when he was seven, my guess is that the owner went off to the hospital in a car and never came back, so he is afraid when I leave in a car. But other than those comparatively minor issues, I’d say he has passed his good boy tests with flying colors, and demonstrated that he was exactly the right choice to bring into our Sunset family.