Cone of Shame

Our life with Ewen continues to march forward. We seem to have quickly moved past the getting to know you phase and already arrived at the "what have you done now?" phase. Our beloved dog Bear spent most of his life in the "what have you done now?" phase. It took us only two weeks to arrive at this stage with Ewen. Ewen is very young, we are guessing, along with our vet, that he is probably in the 9-12 month range. He has boundless energy, goofy expressions and a total lack of judgement that most puppies (and toddler humans) tend to have. 

Last week we took Ewen to the vet to get "tutored" after having him vaccinated and microchipped the week before. We dropped him off on Thursday and picked him up on Friday. He leash was handed back to us while he was wearing the cone of shame. Apparently Ewen immediately went to work once he was fully awake after the anesthesia licking and chewing wear his "parts" used to be, and was amazingly diligent about it. The area got very swollen from all of his attentions, so we were told he had to wear the cone for seven days and have very restricted exercise for five days. 

Given that Ewen's greatest joy in life is to run alongside our truck or gator up and down our almost mile long driveway multiple times per day, the restricted exercise thing was going to be really hard. He's not trustworthy alone in the house (big time chewer) and he isn't crate trained. In true redneck fashion we had to resort to tying him up during much of the day in our yard. Jason said the only thing we needed to do to complete our redneck look was to tow in an old car body and tether Ewen to it using a logging chain.

As often as I've had time for I've tried to take Ewen on long walks up and down the driveway. This hasn't been as easy as it sounds. He's not leash trained, although after the last five days he's much better, and his pent up energy could launch a rocket into outer space. We have walked up and down the driveway with Ewen bounding along in his cone. As you can imagine, this has garnered much attention from the horses. It is next to impossible to take a reasonable picture when attempting to restrain 55 pounds (24kg) of leaping Ewen. I did manage to get a couple of non-blurred pictures of our audiences as the cone-headed dog bounded along the driveway. 

We made it through our five days of restricted exercise and let Ewen run around some on his own tonight. He is currently engaging in one of his favorite activities, sitting on our porch barking at nothing. Thankfully he has been relatively quiet when he's been in the house. He has two more days in the cone of shame and then hopefully we are done with Ewen's tutoring. Let's hope we all make it.

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Jason and Ewen

One of our audiences as I walked Ewen; Walon, Toledo, Donovan, Johnny and Oskar

Kennedy (far left) and Clayton (far right) had to come over and join the others in staring at Ewin in his cone

Lotus, Lofty, Donneur and Silver - "OMG, what IS that thing?"

MyLight, Calimba and Cinnamon

Lofty and Donneur

Nemo and Taco

Gus, our newest resident at the farm (not to be confused with our grey resident also named Gus)

Homer and Moe

Apollo and Hemi

Thomas and Baby

Lily and Traveller

Elfin

We try our best to like Timbit, but as Jason's expression shows, the struggle is real.