Pam and Caro, thanks for replying, and thanks for the good suggestions.
Sorry for another epic. Again, it wan't intended to be. But it fills out the picture quite a lot.
As for professional dog trainers, we're a fair way out in the Australian bush here and on top of that, my husband really hates driving and won't drive to anything he doesn't have to drive to. Needless to say, there's no public transport either, not that he could take Kim on a bus anyway. Also, for the next six weeks at least, he's 'on call at unpredictable hours' so to speak, as we're in the final stages of having our little cottage built and he's having to meet with lots of tradespeople and make lots of decisions. This is a very high stress time for him as you can imagine, so Kim's unplanned arrival (at this rented house where we're not even allowed to have pets, so are keeping our big, boisterous lad out of sight of the real estate agent on top of everything else), and the arrival of his 'teenage rebellion' was pretty bad timing. So when I just ran the dog trainer idea past Alan just now he said he couldn't take on anything that would tie him down to regular hours until we were finally in our new place. That's another 5 Km further away from the nearest town (Bundaberg), making it a 50 Km round trip. And I've read some bad things about experiences with trainers who didn't know RRs, didn't know where their specific buttons were, and were at the very least ineffective. And at the moment more than ever before, the last thing we have is money to burn if the trainer isn't RR savvy. It's the same reasoning which has created at least three RR forums that I know of personally, and possibly more, and what makes us join a RR forum as opposed to a generalised dog behaviour forum.
Having said that, there are a lot of dog owners in this beachside hamlet (though they're mostly retired people, usually with little yappy lapdogs), and it's just remotely possible that one of them is a retired dog trainer or handler, and we can at least ask if they've had experience with RRs. We could put a note up in the local shop window, and look in the Yellow Pages and the local Business Directory and see if there's anything that Alan's prepared to drive to and can find the time to drive to, even just once or twice. Kim is at least great in the car. Once his harness is snapped onto the seatbelt he just sits there and watches the view or goes to sleep.
As for tiring him out, we are very, very highly conscious of that already. Alan's major focus of each day re Kim is to tire him out as much as possible so he'll be easier to live with, and he does get quite a lot of exercise, charging around chasing things and sometimes playing with other dogs down the beach, where they spend at least a couple of hours daily in addition to a couple of ordinary walks and/or bike runs. He also has a Springer bicycle attachment which I bought and mounted to his bicycle which he sometimes uses to give Kim a run. (Yes, we keep him on the grass and don't let him run too far at his age, and try not to overstress his growing bones, though when he's playing with Alan or another dog down the beach he barrels along like a stocky Greyhound and to stop him doing that would be to not exercise him and not bleed off his very abundant energy, so I don't know how or where we should be drawing the line there.)
it it is in fact partly in aid of tiring him out that Alan does play these games with him in the front yard, if he hasn't got time to take him down the beach for his real exercise. Alan was trying to play the closest RR approximation of 'fetch' which Kim would accept, but Kim had other ideas and 'fetch' always gets sidetracked. We both know that he's not a retriever and that RRs don't do 'fetch', but Kim does love to chase any moving object and pounce on it, so he will play 'fetch' by RR rules up to a point, that point being when he decides to leap up at Alan rather than at the stick he's about to throw.
And there are a few people with dogs whom Alan and Kim have met and made friends with and which, if they meet (and I've been suggesting to him a regular meet-up daily for a while now, but he hasn't got around to it), will allow the dogs to play together (although what actually happens is that Kim does all the chasing and the other dog mostly just runs away, either in play or for real: even other dogs his size or bigger, e.g. a big full-grown Labrador he plays with down the beach sometimes) find him a bit overpoweringly enthusiastic and rumbunctious. One, an herding/obedience-trained Border Collie who will be our next door neighbour when our cottage at the other end of the village is finally finished being built in six weeks or so, simply couldn't take it and just ran and kept running at full speed to just get away, not liking it at all, while Kim joyfully and relentlessly chased the poor dog. So unfortunately what he's learnt so far about the dog 'pack order' is that he's at the top of it. But there's a big, macho-looking bloke with what looks like a bull terrier (I've only seen it once from a distance, months ago) who will also be a neighbour when we've moved, and whose dog can apparently just about cope psychologically if not physically (short legs; Kim will have to run doughnuts around him), and who has agreed already that Kim and his dog can be playmates. But that's all a couple of months away; a long time in the puberty of a RR.
There are a pair of what, at a guess I would say (being no expert) were British Bulldog x Boxers (they look like Winston Churchill but are a little too narrow, tall and leggy to be pure Bulldogs, I think) around the corner from where we are now, and I've been trying to get Alan to introduce himself and Kim to the people there for a while now. But they're out every time either of us has been there and seem to be out every day. I went up to the gate yesterday with Kim as part of my walk, and although he had been dismissive of the various little dogs which yapped at us when we went past other houses, he took these two seriously and seemed intimidated by their confident attitudes, even though he's substantially bigger than the bigger of the pair.
But they were a pretty intimidating pair, growling and barking at the gate and, unlike the little yappy dogs, really meaning it (I wouldn't have walked through that gate, with or without Kim). And though I hung around for a bit to see if friends could be made, I couldn't attract any human attention (the blocks here are 1 acre sized and the house was set back, though in full view), and don't think anyone was at home or they'd have come out to see what all the protracted barking was about. They were defending their territory; fair enough. With suitable introductions I still reckon they'd at least be a match for him psychologically, which would be a first, but the owner/s would have to be there, and they never are. So the big bloke with the bull terrier is the only dog on our radar atm, and that's not going to happen until we move.
As for desexing, he was desexed a few weeks ago, but he doesn't seem to have noticed, and the vet said it could take from six weeks to six months to have a noticeable effect on his behaviour. Fwiw, he still hasn't matured enough to have started cocking his leg; he still squats to piss, like a puppy. But if either of you watched the YouTube video of him playing with the Aussie Cattle Dog, you might have noticed some, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" body language from both. Kim had only just been desexed a week when that was shot, and that Red Heeler is apparently a 16 month old undesexed bitch. (The first question her owner, the plumber at our building site, asked Alan when he saw Kim looking abundantly male and well-endowed as he does was, "Has he been neutered?").
Caro,
As for trying soap, I just did. Alan got a cake of soap from the bathroom and I handed it to him and he tried to eat it, and kept trying, dropping it only because it's slippery and picking it up again to chew some more, with every sign of enjoyment. Even with his history of trying to eat anything and everything, I wasn't expecting that. He only stopped because the cat distracted him and he went off to play with her. He will, it seems, cheerfully eat soap, and probably anything else you can think of that he might not like, although I'm open to more suggestions. I haven't tried kerosene or diesel oil yet; I don't really fancy them on my skin or trust them not to damage the nylon leash, so I've been saving them up as a last resort
But the list of things we have already tried includes, but is not limited to, double-strength cat/dog repellent, the very potent flavours of teatree, wintergreen and eucalyptus oils, the very bitter juice of Aloe vera leaves and chilli pepper. He will lick, and has licked, all of these off my hands with evident relish when he's come over for a friendly lick/chew and I've had them on my hands at the time. There is apparently nothing he will not eat or try to, and also apparently enjoy.
Part of the baggage which he still carries from his abusive early childhood is a hatred of leashes or cord of any kind tethering him in any way. He has already chewed through one expensive harness (the chest strap, which he could reach while wearing the harness) and one, almost two, expensive leashes. We had to use a harness initially because he would not walk if a leash was attached to his collar: he'd sit down on his bum, dig all four paws in and look terrified and determined. He'd clearly been dragged along against his will by his previous abusive owner and had something very traumatic done to him.
We started off without any leash at all while we earned his trust and fed him homoeopathic fear remedies, then got him used to the harness which, not tugging him at the neck, wasn't so threatening to him. Now he just chews his leash whenever he's frustrated or bored at the beginning of a walk or if we stop, and he can do a lot of damage in a very short time these days; he bit right through a $120 retractable leash in less than a minute yesterday. So we've tried a lot of different things on the other leash to stop him ruining it (it's an expensive 5 metre heavy duty retractable one; he'd never have tolerated a fixed leash).
We also try giving him other things to chew for general day-to-day chewing behaviour, but what I've noticed (and this is probably stating the obvious, though in all my months of RR and dog-related researches I've never seen the distinction clearly spelt out or even mentioned) is that there are two types of chewing: there's the type which will be satisfied with a bone, for when he just has an urge to chew, and we keep up a good supply of real and fake rawhide bones etc, for that. But the other sort of chewing is an interpersonal, "let's play' message, leading quickly into play-biting; he wants to play, hence the play-biting. Right from the start I tried to keep something other than human skin between us and in his mouth, i.e. a toy or a piece of rag wrapped in a ball, and he'd wrestle, tug and play. But he still prefers my hand and arm, and I suppose that's because the instinct comes from play-biting other puppies in the litter and other dogs in play-fights, which means skin-to-skin contact with its 'live' feel and feedback.
I still always try to keep something between us and I always say firmly, "No bite!" when he tries it on with my hand. But the play-fighting seems to be part and parcel of the whole dominance thing, which is why, before puberty, he stopped play-biting me immediately and completely for at least six weeks after I took that tip from another RR forum and grabbed the scruff of his neck and intimidated him with eye contact from above etc, the message then being 'mummy doesn't like it, so stop it now!'.
But maybe he's too old for 'scruff of the neck' to have much meaning now; it certainly didn't work yesterday, though pretending to 'go for his throat' did. Maybe it has to be 'more dominant dog in the pack doesn't like it, so stop it now!' at this age.
What I did yesterday with him my dominant dog act seems to have borne some fruit anyway, although we'll now have to find a way to maintain it. I'm typing this 24 hrs later, and Alan has said he was a lot easier to handle today, only tried to jump up once during a walk and stayed down once he was pushed down and didn't jump up again. He hasn't tried biting me today either, though lots more licking. He seems just generally more calm and peaceful. I read in a 'human - dog pack hierarchy' article once that a dog feels more stable and secure knowing his or her place in the hierarchy. I don't know if that's true or not, but Kim seems calmer and less hyperactive today than before.
We always, every time, whole-heartedly and without exception, praise him mightily when he does something right (it's such a nice feeling that we don't even have to remember to try; we really are as pleased as we seem to be), but we have both got somewhat lax lately on the rewards front. We used to carry them everywhere in our pockets and do obedience sessions with every walk, e.g. getting him to sit before crossing a road and then rewarding him if and when he did it, even if we had to force his bum down because he was watching a butterfly or staring into space and not listening. I don't know if it was his past or if he's naturally just up at the more stubborn end of the RR spectrum, but even though he would get a tasty bite-sized reward every single time he did, or was made to do, what he was told (and I've always operated by the 'make sure he always, always ends up doing what we've told him to do, so he never gets the idea that ignoring us is acceptable, or even an option' and he's gobbled literally hundreds of treats by now, only when he's obeyed a command and at no other time, so as to instal and reinforce the concept, 'obedience = tasty snack and there's no other way of getting a tasty snack', he's been a very slow learner in the obedience stakes, though he's very quick and bright in areas which interest and attract him.
Maybe we would have got there in the end with perseverance, and maybe if I can get Alan to start doing it all regularly again or if my health improves for a bit or if Kim calms down a lot, we still will. But certainly over the last few months that routine has slipped dramatically, I suppose because Alan finds it easier just to treat him like a Labrador and accommodate his behaviour and I've been too busy having migraines to even know what's been happening. Neither of us is a disciplinarian by nature, and I would much prefer to treat him like a Labrador as well. I don't enjoy training the way some people apparently do, although I do appreciate the results. But the difference is that I *can* be firm and dominant when I know there's a good reason, even though I don't enjoy it, but Alan just can't. He can go through the motions, though he usually doesn't even do that these days due to his stress/busyness levels and his big issue with conflict. But even when he does, Kim sees right through it and reads it for what it is; an act with no substance behind it.
There's no question but that we, in our situation and with our characters, are not ideal RR owner material, but we are both doing our best and we both really really love him and don't want to 'trade him in for an easier model', to put it crudely. All of you who love RRs for what they are will understand why. Once you're under that RR spell, there's no going back. Needless to say, Kim doesn't want to be 'traded in' either. If only we could reason with him; that's what we both did successfully with our respective sons, and it worked very well. Learning to speak Dog, RR Dialect is harder than we expected.
