this last week or so i've been calling my dogs to come and lay beside me while I grit my teeth and try and endure the attacks in silence. My poor catahoula gets alien snatched and snuggled while I brace for life when i feel a shadow come on. Sometimes i can "hide" the attack from my family because its under kip 6/7 and I have a relatively high pain tolerance. I still get restless kicking about,rocking back and forth to some degree, groaning and so on though. Our catahoula was an abused breeder rescue who is incredibly timid around men in general so shes usually really solitary expressing porch dog behaviour . She's always very timid but she's showed up at my side laying on me 3x now unsolicited within 10 minutes of an attack kicking off. This most recent one hit me so fast that I thought I was going to start puking.
Our chihuahua seems to go into a licking frenzy on me up to half an hour or more before an attack unsolicited and has done this a handful of times this week almost consistently before an attack. Both of which have done their individual behaviours in tandem at least once and that was a MASSIVE attack that left me pretty much incapable of speaking because it was so intense.
I've considered scent training one of them to help give myself an early alert but i'm wondering if that's even really necessary at this point. Neither of these incidents has been followed by a lack of attack within 30 minutes. Both have been 100% accurate So far. They don't always catch it but the ones they have "acted strangely" about have been considerable, just like the ones I called them to me about
I'd like to train our Chihuahua because he would be much easier to take around with me but he needs behaviour training where sas our catahoula is exceptionally docile and well behaved but is terrified of vehicles and incredibly distracted by dogs.
I don't have much in terms of remediation at the moment besides D and M which I Can't do publicly but early alert gives me at least a few moments to brace for impact.
Does anyone here have pets or service animals that give off warnings, show compassion behaviours, or legitimately trained for alert?
In my jurisdiction i'm "service dogs in training" "SDIT" are afforded all legal rights and protections as fully trained Sd's and from my extensive research documentation is unecessary and often times seen as compounding misunderstandings about responsible and legitimate sd/its and handlers.
If I could have advanced notice on the migraines and clusters on the go in my day to day that would be huge for me especially as these attacks are becoming more violent and frequent.
Christmas day our Chihuahua started frantically trying to lick me while I was driving right before we got to my family members house about 10 minutes later a hellacious attack hit me. If I were totally alone with him that would have provoked me to pull over to begin with. At the time my wife and I just thought he was acting out about going for s ride but in hindsight it was an immediate and abrupt change in his behaviour from calm and hanging out to frantically attempting to get my attention. i'm beginning to see a pattern with both dogs.
