The Dog Blog

The reason I wrote about Ollie and his winter chill almost two years after his passing is because I was recently reminded of my dear, sweet Ollie when, as the days grew darker and colder, Hugo attached himself to the various heat vents in my house as though they were long lost lovers.

Hugo is quite lean and fit and doesn’t have much body fat, and apparently he gets chilly. He’s learned to cope with this in various ways; either by using Dune's always slightly elevated body temp to his advantage or, as mentioned above never leaving the heat register. But I finally got the message yesterday. Hugo. Hates. Winter. And he is COLD.

So, yesterday afternoon I went out and did something I never thought I’d do. I took Hugo-Louis shopping for a sweater he could comfortably wear indoors.

I recently sent out a joyful announcement about our new dog "Zen". Unfortunately, he will not be staying in our home. Nothing tragic has happened, other than a mismatch that did not have to be, and a lot of sadness at this end. When we decided to rescue a dog, our criteria was that he would be a young adult (2-3 years or so, past the adolescent stage), be good with people and other dogs, and have a medium but definitely not high energy level. The rescue and I talked at great length about these things. Super high-energy dogs are wonderful, but are not a good fit in our particular home/lifestyle. Because the couple who were giving Zen (a 2-year-old German Shepherd mix) up elected to show him themselves rather than giving him back to the rescue and having them re-evaluate him and show him at adoption days (the rescue agreed to this), there were things about him the rescue was not aware of.

This past weekend was our school’s annual fun day and prize giving. The highlight of the event is no doubt the fun events, which included a number of very silly games like sack races, wheelbarrow races, egg & spoon races etc.

Year after year it astounds me how much the handlers enjoy these games, even though their dignity takes a mammoth nosedive! I suppose for the handlers it’s really nice to forget about job stress, traffic, people issues and budgets and concentrate all their efforts on keeping an egg on a spoon while they dash toward a finish line.

Perhaps you've heard of the fun clicker training game, 101 Things To Do With a Box. If time permits, and I think I can do it quickly, I demonstrate to clients the speed with which something very foreign and odd can be taught to a dog simply by understanding timing and feedback.

Toby was a dog I had a chance to meet and then see again 4 days later (I also worked with his "sister", a yellow lab named Daisy who, if you watch carefully, can be seen in the video link, bored in the background with such shenanigans).