10/22/06: Shy, scared little Bandit arrived in Minneapolis all the way from Missouri yesterday evening. He was all tuckered out, had been car-sick, and just wanted to sleep.
I brought him to his temporary foster home and let him rest in his travel crate--even though the bedding needed to be washed and he needed to be cleaned up--because it would have been too traumatic to try to handle him.
He wouldn't even drink water for several hours. He would open his eyes and perk up his ears when I talked to him. I told him he was going to find a good home with lots of love and good food. But mostly he just slept.
Since he had an upset tummy from his transport, I didn't want to pull on his collar to get him out of his travel crate and into a bigger kennel. So I set up bedding just outside the crate door and left the door open for him in an enclosed area in the house.
In the night, he crawled out of the crate and slept peacefully right outside of it on the clean bedding. But then about 1 a.m. he started crying. Well, actually, howling. He's just a baby, and he's been through a huge upheaval. He was scared and alone and didn't know where he was. And he was starting to feel hungry.
So I started to feed him a few tablespoons of canned puppy food at a time. He's quite thin and undernourished, so I'm transitioning him onto a good puppy food (Wellness brand) slowly. I give him a few tablespoons every half hour or so. If he sleeps for a while, I feed him a little less often than that. He's doing very well, going to the bathroom on the newspapers in the house, and he hasn't been sick since he started eating.
He won't let me get close to him. His food dish is in his kennel. He watches me warily while I put the food in his dish, and waits for me to walk away before he'll approach the dish. He licks his bowl clean.
He's getting used to me doing household things, and will lay and watch me from a distance, but moves away if I get too close.
This morning he's wide awake and feeling better. And howling sadly. I howl quietly with him, and he looks a little surprised at me, and then quiets down for a while. He's beautiful -- I can't take a picture right now because the flash will scare him too much. I'll try a little later as the sun gets brighter.
