Pupdate!

In two weeks, The Pup will be 9 months old!  9 MONTHS!

¾ of a year!

(Right? Can someone please proof the math for me?)

Anyways, the poor little mutt has been lurking in the shadows as an outlier in Blog Land recently, so I thought I’d give her some focal print time.  

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The BIG news (and you’re going to soon see that not much has been going on here recently) is that she has finally given herself over to her desires. (No, she’s NOT knocked up… but there are a few handsome BC boys out there she’d be HAPPY to propagate the species with…) 

You see, whenever a hose comes out, she tries to behave like a proper dog and run away, or act all affronted if she should get sprayed.  She’s been known to scream bloody murder at the slightest trickle touching her delicate toes (although that might just be because she enjoys screaming bloody murder and does it 100 times a day for funsies).   But I’ve noticed that while she acts annoyed and bothered by the hose, she always gives it these sly, curious looks when she thinks I’m not watching. Lately they’ve turned downright beseeching.   It was SO obvious to me that it was all a front, but she just wouldn’t admit to herself that the one thing she REALLY wanted was to

Get

Wit

That

Hose

Spray

BABY.

Ye-ah.

The other day it finally happened. I was trying to spray the outdoory gunk off the equipment and the dogs were out in the yard with me playing with a toy.  They’d already both made a great appearance of being highly annoyed by the hose’s presence and had gone to ridiculous lengths to avoid the path of the spray. 

Until.

All of a sudden, this little white flash enters my periphery; it slashes in front of me, cutting through the spray mid-air.  I see it stop and spin back and realize that it’s The Pup.  Joy and Rapture are registered on her face. 

It’s a pretty special moment for her, I can tell.  Self-actualization, catharsis, destiny… all rolled into the coils of that hose. 

And. She. Didn’t. Stop. 

I don’t know how much water actually hit the equipment after her moment of weakness because it had to go through her face first.   Oh well.  Clearly it was the highlight of her little life so far. Who am I to deny her? 

And it was adorable.  Video:

 

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On the training front- well, we’ve done little training.   She’s still managed to learn how to scale a fence and how to do a vertical leap onto a table from a stand still.  Good dog?

We did a little practice the other day though- she was pretty awesome and drivey.  I say ‘pretty awesome’ because she had one giant ADHD moment where I ended up punting her five feet. Why? Because the wind kicked up a big leaf and she had to run across my path to chase it.  Sigh.

Other than THAT she was a good girl.  It was the first time working without a fence and she did great with being loose.  We did a bit of contact/tunnel discrimination and I determined that she has none.  She seems to use slats to distinguish the teeter from the dogwalk which was really good information for me (slatless dogwalk equaled perfect ‘4 on’ at the top of the on ramp… then one big look on confusion when she figured out she was still in the air).   We practiced on a ‘new’ teeter and she was phenomenal.  She slid it for the first time in awhile (the last time she did it, it freaked her out a tad) and this time she seemed to think that idea ROCKED because she kept doing it with her ‘yeehaw’ face.

I figured out as well what I need to do to get drive out of turns; despite the cik/cap work we’ve done since she was a fetus she still thinks turns are lame EXCEPT, I now know, when she is rewarded after with a contact. So now we practice our wraps with incentive to drive out to a contact  It’s also helping her with commitment to the jump- no jump, no contact.  HA! Outsmarted you for once, you little minx!

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Oh, hah, one more thing. Since she’s been such a nice girl recently, I decided to see if she would be able to sleep out last night.  I removed everything she could get into and The Dog and I set a good example by getting into bed and not moving. 

Yeah, after ten minutes of her sniffing everything and alternating jumping on my face and barking at The Dog to play we decided she was not QUITE ready.  Maybe in another 9 months we will try that again.