Living with an retired agility dog...

If you've ever had an retired agility dog, you know what a worry  and constant heartbreak it can be especially if they are older dog . Chris Stamp's Standard Poodle Scrappy was his most successful agility dog to date. She got to G6 just before Covid struck, made the final of the ABC and won the Adams Darby. Most of the time, she came away from a show with a rosette. But her life was not easy from the start.

Scrappy was premature and tiny but grew up to be an amazing girl/boy.

Yes, that's right.

When he/she was four weeks old, the vet sexed her as a boy, but when she was about nine months, she had a three day season. The breeder had said that they weren't 100% sure that she was a boy. After her season, our vet opened her up. He was concerned that she may have had a half-developed womb, but there weren't, in fact, any reproductive organs there at all, except for the tubes which were going no where.

She was about two when she got an ear infection which wouldn't go away. In the end, my vets sent her to The Willows to see a dermatologist called Jon Hardy who examined her and had her in and under anesthetic (no. 2), scoped her ears and discovered a very bad infection around the ear drum. He cleaned them and give us treatment . It all cleared up but four months but then it started up again. This time the infection was producing black wax. She had to go back in again (3rd anaesthetic) had they cleaned them and a different treatment was given.

This went on for about for about four years, going back for treatment every six months. She had to go though it every time. Though all of this, she carried on and even qualified for Crufts. As I said, she is a fighter.

In the end Jon talked about closing her ear completely. We didn't feel very good about this. He said there was one more treatment that we could try but every dose would have to be made up by the vets. I had to I can give it to her over the period of a month. The side effects would kill every thing inside her ear. We decided to try this and it worked,. As I write this, touch wood she has been ear infection free.

Just to make sure it wasn't a food allergy, we tried feeding her a variety of different foods, cutting out anything food-wise which could trigger an allergic reaction. All it did was give her sensitive stomach.

She was never great with a loud noise but it took a dramatic turn for the worse in 2023 with sweating and very violent shacking where her whole body would just shack. Back we went to the vets for more tests that all come back clear. It was decided that with all the treatment that she had for her ears that it had left them very sensitive to noise. We will have to work out how to keep her calm when this happens in the end the best way was to let here work though it I know this sounds hard but it didn't matter if you put your arms around her or just sat next to her it would only stop when she was back in control.

In November 2024, she stopped drinking and then eating. She went from 19.5kg to 18.2kg in a blink of an eye. We rushed her to the vets along with a pee sample for them to analyze. The vets admitted her there and then as she was very poorly and dehydrated. They put her on a drip, and we left her there. Let me remind you that after all the time she has been in the vets and left she now hates them.

They rang the next morning to say that she had a good night but still not eating and would do tests. That night all the tests had come back normal apart from the dehydration as she was still on a drip and they wanted to keep her in overnight. I went in to see her and try to get her to eat, but she gave me the cold shoulder. She always showed you when she wasn't happy with you.

That night she was strong enough to do a scan, and the next morning they rang me and side that there was a shadow in the stomach and wanted to do an operation to see what was going on. We give them the go ahead.

About 5pm that night I had a call from the vets which we were dreading.

They said that they didn't find anything out of the ordinary internally. The shadow may have been gas but, as she wasn't eating, they fitted a feeding tube which they did say they may do. She had come out of the anaesthetic already, remember fighter but still wasn't ready to go home as till she would eat on her own. Had a call on Sunday to say that she was eating slowly and that she could come home. Happy days.

Over the next week it was a struggle to get her to eat but we never had to use the tube. When we took her for a check up on the Friday after she had put on 0.7 kg, and they took out the tube from here neck which was making her cough.

We slowly started to get her back to normal and when she started to shake, we could give her ½ a paracetamol which seemed to calm her. Christmas was good but she slept a lot, but we kept her eating until new years eve, at 12am it was like a war zone in Banbury, I hate fireworks, but this is a different matter entirely.

The next morning, she was back to square one and was back at the vets on the day after for more tablets and injections but she came home, it took us over a week to get her back to sort of eating and this is still where we are today, struggling to get her to eat but we know the signs now of when she will eat and when she won't.

She likes her walks and goes out to the agility field where she loves to be around the equipment and does some low height jumps and tunnels, running after a ball.

Then there is the other side when she looks so sad they are the times when you could cry.

Scrappy fights on.

About the author...
Chris Stamp

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