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Friday, June 23, 2006

Oh, Behave!


Having never owned a dog of my own before, I am therefore not prepared for some of the experiences I'm finding myself going through. In the last week my baby dog has decided that he no longer needs to obey me and rules suddenly don't apply! Although people have told me that their dogs went through similar phases when they we around his age, I'm still so frustrated. I've always been so proud of Savvy for being such a clever and quick learner, and now he's doing all sorts of "childish" things. The other day we were playing in the yard and he took off into the road with a toy. This has NEVER happened before, and is unnacceptable to me. This morning he jumped up on the counter to knock off a pizza box and eat the cheese. He has NEVER taken anything off the counter (coffee table, yes, but that's really easily accessible). Last night R. had him at a friend's house and after playing with their two chocolate labs, Smith and Wesson, he got all wild and ran up to a woman carrying a baby and tried to grab the blanket from her arms! Not good. It is so tough to try to be patient with him when he's not listening to us. I'm sure it's just a phase, but I hope he grows out of this soon. In the meantime, I just keep stressing the lessons (I thought) he had learned completely in the first 6 months.
I'm also at the point where I don't know if I should keep taping his ears or not. Both of them now stand, as of yesterday afternoon, but are still floppy at the tips. They don't hang down at all, but when he moves it's obvious they are not as rigid as the lower part of the ear, which would be difficult to bend. As I said before, having never taped dane ears, I'm not sure how rigid or flexible they should be as an end result. I did e-mail my breeder a little while ago, so she'll have some advice. His ears look spectacular and it would be so nice not to worry about taping anymore. It's not a fun experience for him, R., or me. Another thing about taping; the tick population is way up this year in our area, and while wood ticks don't carry Lyme's Disease or anything, they are still disgusting little parasites. We've gotten two ticks off Savage this year, and when his tape came off, there were two more hidden underneath. Not having part of his ears covered with tape would make it a lot easier to spot ticks. I'm not very excited about having them on me, either.
We all went to R.'s cabin on McFarland Lake this week to do some clean-up and mow the lawn. Afterwards we went swimming at the sand beach, and I vowed that I would get little Savage to voluntarily swim. Well, with both his "parents" standing out in the lake, he HAD to follow us. He did very well, though I could tell he wasn't really enjoying it. Anyway, he now knows he is able to swim without anything terrible happening and my hope is that he gets comfortable enough to really love it. He does love being in boats now, and fishing with him is a collosal pain in the butt, with him bouncing around and crawling in everyone's lap and eating minnows. But he loves being with his family and I can't leave him at home while I go out "playing" or I feel guilty.
Still unable to upload more than one picture for each post, which is extremely inconvenient. Which explains the posts that are only pictures and captions!

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