how can I stop eric driving us batty this week.

[ditavonteesed]

lead walks and cone head post neutering. cherry is cowering in a corner most of the time because he doesnt realise he has the cone on and is bashing everyone to death with it. oh and being stuck on a lead is like torture to him. and how in gods name do you stop a sapniel jumping?

I can sympathise with you after seeing one of my relatives with their springer post op. IIRC the vet advised her to take his collar off in the end and put some sort of treatment not directly on but around the stitches to stop him licking/biting at the wound. It did calm him down a little once the collar was off but obviously I know it's the off lead run you'll be counting down to!

Hope he's ok though after his op and he's not scaring your other dog too much

We were able to take our head collar off after a day or so - might be worth a try. He was so much happier. I left it on for crate time but even that was only for maybe 3 days. I found the lead walks so dull though, so sympathy there! I thought we'd get chance to really improve his heel work but he couldn't seem to concentrate due to extreme excitement at being outside. Lots and lots of bones were our saviour I think (as always!)

We gave in on the cone after the first day, as he could manage to lick with it on anyway. I tried 2 different sorts, and a weird towel wrapped round neck device i found on youtube, but he defeated them all
Avoiding jumping turned out to be impossible (7 month old Springer) he was bouncing on and off the sofa's after 2 days. and literally bouncing off the walls a couple of days later.
We also had to use lots of chewable things to keep him still for a bit. Kongs, stuffed bones, chews, but nothing worked for long.

I cracked and let him off the lead after 8 days rather than 10, but kept to areas with no other dogs about, and banned ball chasing

I took Jasper's collar off pretty much immediately, but he was glued externally so no stitches to worry at. I really stepped up the training, taught him a couple of new tricks to keep him busy, and filled many, many kongs/tug-a-jugs. After a few days, I took him to the field when it was empty and let him run about a bit on his extendable lead. It helped. A tiny bit