Posts Tagged ‘new dog’
Telling Trail
Our darling puppy was up to mischief while I was showering yesterday. When I opened the curtain I discovered a trail of evidence strewn across the floor. Somebody was nosing around in a waste basket where they weren’t supposed to be. Who would do such a thing?
Well, our little troublemaker wasn’t smart about hiding his tracks. Asher left behind a critical piece of evidence that gave away his presence.
On Monday, it will be three weeks since we brought home our adopted pup. Cyndie shared a graphic with me that refers to a general 3/3/3 guideline of the adjustment period for a dog after adoption. Three days to decompress/three weeks to learn our routine/three months to start to feel at home.
I didn’t really notice Asher needing to decompress during those first days, but I did wonder what he must be thinking about the change. He is definitely learning our routine and adjusting to it very well, for the most part. There have been several times when he has tested our boundaries. In a couple of months, he will feel at home and hopefully by that time he will have accepted all the boundaries we established.
Today, I am on another kind of trail. I will be joining some of my cycling friends for a ride on the Dakota Rail Regional Trail, heading west out of Wayzata. I need to get serious about putting in saddle time in advance of my annual expedition on the Tour of Minnesota which happens in the middle of June.
In just a couple of blinks, June will be here. I hope the ground dries up enough by then that I will be able to mow the areas I’ve been skipping because they’re too wet.
Here’s hoping the smoke from Canadian wildfires won’t make breathing difficult for bicycling today. I rarely find myself riding with friends at the beginning of my cycling season and I’m looking forward to the chance to visit with folks while pedaling along.
At least we finally have a weekend with pleasant weather to be outdoors without a raincoat.
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Daily Improving
Our new dog, Asher, is making great strides in learning the routines and commands we are trying to teach him. Keeping him off our bed is not 100% yet, but he is overcoming the urge to jump up more than he is giving in to it. One thing that helps clarify this rule is that neither Cyndie nor I hesitate to correct him. He definitely understands we don’t want him up on the bed, but he just can’t help himself from trying when his desire reaches irrepressible levels.
Yesterday, we successfully navigated two walks without ever tethering him with a leash. He pushed the limits of our comfort a couple of times by trotting off the path despite our commands to keep him close, but the excursions were short-lived and he did run back to us when we amped up our excitement about having him return.
That was very rewarding, especially when comparing the anxiety over the possibility of him dissing us entirely and disappearing. On the third walk of the day, he lost the off-leash privilege by ignoring our calls to return for far too long and heading a worrisome distance off our property into the neighboring woods. The leash is more for our peace of mind than punishment to him.
I don’t know if he perceives it that way or not.
We also had good success playing with him in the backyard while unleashed. He loves retrieving felt squeaky balls.
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Big puppy energy in the house gets a little unnerving but outside on the back hill, he tires relatively quickly and his zoomies soon become walking after balls that we toss for him. That’s the point we are confident in the likelihood of him napping for a while after we get inside.
With Asher learning more every day, we are feeling very optimistic about how well he will eventually fit in with us to become the loyal and well-behaved dog we want him to be, for both our sakes.
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Mastering Backspin
Watching Asher play with balls yesterday, it became apparent that he totally understands backspin and uses it to draw them back to him in the absence of having an opposable thumb that would allow him to grasp.
There are glimpses of him employing this trick in the video I posted three days ago. It shows me a level of intelligence that clouds my understanding of what he is smart about and what his puppy-ness has yet to learn. He seems to know so much and so little all at the same time.
Thankfully, he continues to demonstrate progress in comprehending and appropriately obeying the commands we are working on.
He acted a little like Jekyll & Hyde with me on a walk last evening. I couldn’t tell if he was being playful or trying to outsmart me by suddenly becoming intolerant of being leashed. I feel as though every time we show inconsistency, he quickly claims ground that conveys it is he who is training us, not the other way around.
It’s tough for us because we tend to lack a firm plan about what behaviors we intend to establish with absolute rigidity and which we have less concern over permanently enforcing. That rule about allowing him moments on the couch has already become more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.
Asher’s powers with backspin apply to more than just his felt-covered squeaky ball toys. I don’t doubt for a minute his ability to take advantage of any inconsistencies we might be presenting in our expectations for his behavior.
My problem will always be that I desire military precision from a pet dog without going through the military training such behavior requires. My “sort-of-training” methods reliably produce “sort-of-trained” dogs.
I’m pretty sure that ‘difficulty in training a dog’ was on my 3-minute list of reasons not to get a dog I was reciting for Cyndie just over a week ago.
My, how time flies.
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Relatively Damp
Am I prone to understatement? Not always. Sometimes I go to the other extreme. My natural inclination is to be contrarian, so instead of titling this post, “Soaking !#@$ Wet,” I settled on a genteel descriptor for current conditions. The ground around here is actually wetter than an entirely saturated sponge this morning.
I’m sure the trees are soaking this up with glee. Buds are sprouting from every stem and branch and noticeably increasing the hues of green emerging by the day.
Yesterday’s World Labyrinth Day event brought ten visitors to Wintervale, six of whom are family, four friends, plus a small dog. After some stutter-starts at the meeting of dogs, Asher settled into a wonderful acceptance of all the activity, people, and the one pet unfamiliar to him in his new home. All signs continue to hint that we will find success soon in Asher developing into the pet we are hoping he will become for us.
As long as he refrains from putting his nose on the kitchen counter, then his paws, and reaching for an unfinished scone on a plate, or shredding the cover of the pad in his crate, or getting back up on the living room couch again, or failing to recognize we are speaking to him and directing commands his way for compliance.
He appears to be relatively willing to suppress his natural instincts and behave exactly as we desire at all times.
Hah!
Yeah, we got this.
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Developing Patience
If you aren’t sure you have as much patience as you should for dealing with life’s challenges, get a “teen” puppy that needs to be trained. You will be able to practice over and over on developing your ability to be patient.
Asher had a grooming appointment yesterday and the report from the groomer was that he was so dirty she needed to wash him a second time. He’s like a whole new dog. Except for the lack of training. That’s at about the same level.
Although, on the bright side, he is showing signs of being relatively quick to grasp what we want from him. Progress on the “Stay!” command continues to impress us. I don’t expect we will make impressive headway on more than one thing at a time so convincing him that our bed is off-limits will have to wait. He really likes to jump up on our bed.
Even though he could easily defeat our temporarily leaned gates to keep him out of the kitchen or our bedroom, he is respecting them and will eventually lay beside them and wait. I guess he is showing us he’s got some respectable patience of his own.
We did battle against some insanely intense vines that were choking out every helpless tree they could reach.
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The tree above was trying to grow despite the constriction of the vine. I don’t know what kind of vine this is but it is different than the common grape vines around here that sprout little shoots to wrap around branches. This vine just grows around and around so efficiently that it is the wrap that holds tight to branches. In springtime, it is much easier to spot these vines before leaves pop out everywhere to conceal what is really going on.
I need to work on my patience for rooting out the infestations of these insidious vines even though it seems like a losing battle.
I wonder if Asher could be trained to sniff them out. I’ve seen evidence he is more than capable of digging ’em up if we can just locate the main roots.
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Finding Fun
I wish I could say it’s all fun and games having a new “teen” pup that has found himself in an unfamiliar environment. At times Asher behaves like a big goof, but he is also a product of having needed to fend for himself to find food to eat in his earliest days. Left unchecked, he quickly resorts to searching for anything edible. Asher’s body is long and that means that when he stands on his hind legs, he is tall.
Nothing on our counters is safe from his reach, and at this point, he has not learned any self-control that would keep him from taking ill-advised risks to reach potentially edible rewards. We are being tested on every decision we make. To free ourselves from being constantly on guard, we have to think ahead and put up timely barriers to confine Asher to a safe space when we can’t be giving our full attention to his activities.
Still, there has been plenty of fun to be had.
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He is proving to be a good on-leash walker and only chewed through the leash one time while Cyndie was distracted with digging up invasive garlic mustard plants. He played well on the zip line in the backyard and rolled around in smelly leaves on one of our walks.
While on the phone to register ourselves as the owners who adopted Ash, Cyndie learned the paperwork indicated the dog was given his name because he was found on Ash Road. Ash R. I like that we will be going with the name, Asher.
The other names most often used yesterday were, Down and No.
Cyndie made great progress in teaching Asher to stay until she says he can release. We want to teach him that we go through the door first and then he can follow, and that exercise will go much more smoothly when he understands and obeys the “Stay!” command from which we could proceed.
Meanwhile, the horses are having fun because we have been opening up the hay field to them again during the daytime.
They had been confined to the paddocks for a few weeks awaiting the fields to get dryer and the grass to get taller. On the occasion of their first tall grass on Monday, they barely stepped through the gate before stopping to graze. Yesterday, I noticed they were walking a little further in, but it wasn’t all about grazing. They showed an interest in taking some serious naps in the grass under the bright sunshine.
My presence with the chainsaw didn’t ruffle them one bit. I needed to cut up a large dead limb that had fallen from the ailing willow tree in the small paddock. While I had the saw out, there were three fallen trees across trails in the woods and one other leaner in the woods between the house and the shop that I was able to clean up. Then it was time to unload new hay bales and stack them in the hay shed.
It was fun to get some productive work done between the sessions of fun with Mr. Hey-Play-With-Me-Some-More.
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Training Begins
First of all, yesterday’s antics dealing with our first day introducing Asher to our house and property were more tiring than I’m used to lately. Thankfully, it was all good. Asher’s energy is overflowing with playfulness and happy curiosity. Our reference for every situation quickly defaults to the way Delilah behaved differently. We discovered several things that Asher wants to do that Delilah never showed any interest in, like getting up on our bed.
The couch was allowed at his foster home.
We are leaning toward discouraging couch access and hope to hold out entirely against allowing him on our bed. Both Cyndie and I are wrestling over our tendency to refer to Asher with feminine pronouns after our ten years with Delilah. Maybe we should just switch to the non-binary alternatives.
He showed normal curiosity about our explorations on the trails in our woods. We very quickly discovered his ability to dig is magnitudes beyond what we were used to with Delilah. Three quick strokes created a massive canyon in the dirt. Asher dug up several old bones that Delilah had buried in and around the outdoor kennel.
Pulled from his usual surroundings to a world where every sight and sound was brand new, we were unsuccessful in even coming close to getting him to process and obey a “STAY!” command. Asher did great on the zip line in the backyard. He LOVES to play ball and is a great catcher. He got me laughing over the way he would nudge the ball with his nose so it would roll to me as a way to get me to play with him.
Ash showed little in the way of interest in the horses. They were more curious about the new canine leading us around than he was about them. Our treks through the woods revealed several new tree tops that have broken off and fallen to the ground. Yesterday was very windy. Today we may need to learn whether Asher is bothered by the noise a chainsaw makes.
The foster mom warned us he is not a fan of the vacuum.
Whether we intend it or not, training is already underway. It will be a contest to see if Asher is training us more than we are training him. The official obedience classes don’t start for a couple of weeks. Helping him to master the “STAY!” command before then would be a big surprise.
Last night before we retired to our bedroom, we heard a couple of snores coming from his crate. A wonderful end to a super first day.
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Tried Telling
It’s difficult to tell how much the horses grasp the variety of things I find myself trying to say to them. Yesterday I decided to give them a little warning about the pending arrival of a new dog who will be living on the property.
Swings behaved as though she just didn’t want to hear it.
Light remained entirely indifferent to my words.
Mia didn’t look away but she didn’t seem happy to hear anything I had to say.
Mix was too preoccupied with finishing her dinner to participate in my attempts at communicating news about Ash.
Cyndie and I were talking about what nicknames might evolve from such a short name as Ash. One way to play with a name that is too short to trim into a nickname is to lengthen it instead. Our son, Julian, suggested “Ashford.” We like that a lot. Cyndie is prone to adding “bert,” as in Dogbert. Ashbert? I’m okay saying that.
I have come up with Asher. That’s one that we both feel could work for us. We just need to find out what the pup thinks about it.
A little research last night has us thinking the mix of breeds that visually matches his features and coloring are German Shepherd, Labrador Retriever, and/or Rottweiler. The mash of breed names becomes Sheprador based on the images Cyndie found that looked most similar to Ash.
All our wondering about what is to come will soon be replaced by real experiences. Today is the beginning of our next adventure of having a new dog. Huzzah!
Bark! Bark!
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CSI Wintervale
The only crime to report lately is mud shrapnel showing up inside the house. This spring, it hasn’t happened as often as it used to. The primary traffic in and out of our house has been limited to just Cyndie and me. That is about to change with the plan to adopt Ash, a rescued Shepherd Mix. More mud in the house will be a small price to pay.
Cyndie recently showed me her solution for leaving her boots on while retrieving something from inside the house for a project we were working on outside.
Looked like crime scene booties to me. The tedious hassle of getting in and out of boots for a quick indoor trip finally drove her to bag the boots and forge ahead. Works in a pinch but I don’t think it will be the solution for having a dog living with us again.
Time to get the kiddy pool set up by the front door.
Yesterday, we brought Delilah’s crate in from the garage and set it up beneath the spiral staircase, trying two different orientations before settling on the way we had it before. We have been wracking our brains to remember how and why we chose to do things the way we did ten years ago when we brought Delilah home for the first time. We share a common yearning to catch things we might have done, or conversely, failed to do, toward establishing rules and a firm command of desired behaviors in our pet.
What would we like to do differently from the way we attempted to train Delilah to become her best self? We think there is room for improvement.
Our appointment to pick up Ash is set for tomorrow morning. Cyndie has registered for a class of obedience training for him that will start in a couple of weeks.
It would be a crime if we miss the earliest opportunity to train Ash to achieve the best-behaved potential his mixed breed is capable of after the rough start he may have experienced before rescue. The only obvious issue when he first arrived at his current foster home was food aggression related. Since we don’t have any other house pets right now, that won’t be a big struggle for us at the start.
One of my favorite behaviors Delilah mastered was her patient and reliably obedient adherence to waiting in a designated “Place” until a release command allowed her to approach her bowl of food. I fumble around with a desire to have a dog that behaves with a military level of discipline without us being good at establishing a military level of training.
Despite ever reaching the ultimate level of control we both would have appreciated having with Delilah, Cyndie and I achieved enough success teaching her that we are hopeful for that much and more with Ash. We look forward to discovering what differences his personality will bring to the process.
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Relative Something 