One lucky boy!

I received the best Christmas present this year.
It wasn't wrapped in a decorative package with bows.
It came in the form of a phone call from a dog owner on Christmas Eve.

This about a 6 year old Greyhound who lost his right front leg to cancer.
He is doing well from the surgery and has full mobility. He loves to run and play with his house mate but he lost more than his leg, he lost his confidence particularly on stairs.
He learned to adapt to everything else in life but his adaptive process, using his back legs to propel him up into the van, was not functional to use on stairs.
This boy is lucky however, he has owners who were dedicated to helping him live a full life once again.

The problem they were facing was the home they would be moving to has stairs and many of them.
Two levels of stairs to get into the house and a flight to the upper living level inside the home.
The current home had no stairs. The owners realizing a potential problem tried to use a neighbors front steps in an attempted to get him doing stairs using treats before the move but to no avail.

He was scarred and lacked in the self confidence to balance and support his body while moving his legs independently required to go up steps.

My goal was to help him re-learn balance and trust in his own abilities to adapt once more this time to stairs.

None of this would have worked had the owners not been dedicated to helping their dog past his fears.

We started slowly. The first was to get him walking and stepping on something different and foreign to him.
I placed a small, collapsible A-frame flat on the ground. Flat and low but had just a little bit of movement when stepped onto. At first I used treats to try and lure him forward, no go for the treats.
So we adapted and just had the owner walk him to the board and limit his options of being able to move around and away from it or to just jump over by completely avoiding the board.

We built one movement forward at a time. One foot, then another until finally standing and choosing to get on and off by his own design.

We built the degree of difficulty slowly by changing the level and angle for him to step onto and walk up. The goal was to build confidence, self control, balance and to use his legs independently while maintaining support.

Then we limited his options to keep him from seeking to jump over or away from and praised him wildly for making a move forward.
Each forward progress was met with lots of praise. After a repetition of behavior, he was rewarded with play time.

In between our session, his owner found stairs for him to climb. First big wide steps that would allow for stopping and balancing between steps. He starting with just a few step, increasing to as many as twelve steps up and down.

We ended our first hurdle by accomplishing an achievement past fear. The big fellow had made a self discovery by starting to trust himself and his owner to keep him safe.

We continued to increase the degree of difficulty by changing the angle, level and surfaces for him to step onto, up and over.

Once he accomplished the first stages of getting up and onto a surface, we repeated this a few times and at some point confidence set in he did it by himself.

Our last session we took him to a friends house who had eight steps up the front of her house but built in the typical size, narrow and steep.
He didn't like them at first and refused to try. We limited his options and the owner went up the stairs with him one at a time holding onto his vest handle and I handled the back end to keep him from rolling backwards.
He made it to the top and we cheered.
Down he went and after two more tries, he was heading up and down the stairs on is own as proud as could be!

We talked about the possibility of altering and adapting the outside stairs up to the new house by either making them wider or adding another landing or two. The builder was able to come up with some variations and we hit on something that would work well.

I got my best Christmas present when the owner called me Christmas Eve to tell me his boy is walking up and down not only the outside steps but the more difficult inside stairs on his own.
The owner said he was sitting and having a cup of coffee in the morning was greeted by his big fellow standing next to him in the kitchen on the second floor. He came up the stairs all by himself!

This is one lucky boy! His owners never gave up on hoping for his having the best life possible. Nor did they chose to get rid of him because he didn't fit their lifestyle needs.