Update on dogs

Bella is doing great, everything is healing up nicely. We had the dog behaviorist over on Sunday. She had good things to say about their relationship. She watched them interact with each other and us and listened to us tell her all about them.

She said neither of them are aggressive but Boots does have some self control issues (he's can be destructive - mainly with Avery's toys but other things as well) and that he's rude and obnoxious to Bella, like a younger brother can be. She said Bella is extremely tolerant. She showed us things we hadn't noticed before, like the fact that when Bella comes up to me he will immediately come over and either groom her or play nip at her to get between us and that he follows her around and gets in her way continually.

She showed us techniques for interrupting them when we are worried play could get escalated into something more serious. Rather than reacting and yelling at them before they are actually doing something wrong we should call them over to interrupt them so they can get distracted without being in trouble.

She had lots of good information for us and thinks that there is no reason to get rid of Boots. We have some work ahead of us but its better than we thought.