Trinity has been one busy pup this holiday season. She is growing up too quickly but I like the dog she is becoming. She has made leaps and bounds in her development and I am very pleased with the progress she has made.
Thanksgiving was at our house this year and Trinity very much enjoyed herself. She had a few good romps with the other dogs in the yard and chewed on a marrow bone for most of the afternoon. She was nice and quiet in her crate and barely made a peep through all the comings and goings. My niece and nephew visited late in the day and enjoyed getting to cuddle with her a bit.
We spent the rest of the weekend in Maine and she got to go on two long hikes. Our special trip to the stream with Rush and Zuma was a blast for her. She loves chasing the other dogs through the woods and messing around the stream. Despite the cold water she followed everyone else right in and dunked herself. Her leash manners are improving and with the Easy Walk harness even Julia can take a turn walking her without getting pulled down. Trinity continues to amaze me at how sweet she is with kids, she is noticeably more careful and gentle with them. Perhaps she has a calling as a therapy dog at some point.
Her social development is really coming along and the improvement is noticeable. She has so much better self control around other puppies. Previously when she was over excited she would pile on the other dog and make a lot of noise. She was overstimulated and inappropriately over the top in her play. She was easy to interupt and redirect but I wanted her to be able to do this herself. I set out over the last few weeks to expose her to a variety of adult dogs and puppies that would give her better feedback and not get her going so much that she lost control. I also taught her the beginning of the cue "leave it". Right now the beginning of my leave it cue is a whistle to get her attention, then I click her for acknowledging me and leaving the other dog and either follow that up with a treat or a drink from a water bottle I usually carry with me. I was able to achieve a really good amount of reliability for calling her away when I saw the play getting too heated in about a week.
Last week I worked on varying her playmates and started having Paul bring her to our dog daycare to give her a variety of playmates and a place to practice. I am happy to report though it is still a work in progress, she is doing amazingly well. This part of her development is very important. I take my dogs alot of places and though I don't expect them to like every other dog they meet I do expect them to be able to get along with most dogs and ignore others. In order to prepare them for life fully I invest a lot of hours in exposing them to lots of other dogs and supervising their play and interactions so that I can teach them the nuances of getting along with other dogs regardless of their playmates play style. This is an important point in socializing a young dog. Exposing them to other dogs is not enough to insure that they will know what to do with the variety of personalities they will come across in their lifetime. Being able to deal with bullies, out of control dogs, soft dogs, pushy dogs, energetic ones fearful ones, the whole gamit of personalities a young dog needs exposure and experience with behaviorally healthy dogs. Finding behaviorally healthy dogs is harder than it would seem and believe me despite my experience in raising puppies I still fret alot over making sure that we help our pups learn to play appropriately. I love daycare for that reason as I get to hand pick who my puppies play with and make sure that the playmates have something to offer eachother.
Trinity took several trips to our local pet stores this week. She was a little unsettled by the automatic doors so we took our time and worked through it. She wasn't so much frightened by them, she just had to stand there a bit and watch them open and close a few times to figure out what she was suppose to do. She trotted up and down the aisles, investigating the toy and treat aisles carefully and met lots of fellow shoppers. We got a lot of good socialization in including an older woman with a cane, a man in a wheelchair, a guy with amazing cowboy boots who also happened to have a beard (we HAD to say hi to him) ! We saw the fish, the birds,the rabbits, rats and stinky ferrets, overall a very productive venture. Because of her obvious reaction to the automatic doors I wanted to practice so I made sure we went to a few other locations and worked on the same thing. With each experience she got better and better.
This past weekend our town had a big holiday parade and all the businesses had open houses. We saw Santa Claus, Frosty, dancers, the high school marching band and about 1000 people. We were invited to go into several businesses including two of our local pet stores and Trinity had a blast meeting kids, adults and people of all kinds. There was loud music, crowds, dancers, push carts, balloons and lots of weird novel stuff. The commuter rail goes through our town as well and we were able to sit and watch it go by with barely a blink of an eye. Since our training center is along the commuter rail tracks Trinity is use to the train sounds and doesn't seem to even notice them. It's pretty amazing to watch this little puppy stand her ground while the commuter rail blasts by at 70 mph not more than 10 feet from her. The best part of the holiday stroll was that we got to meet so many kind people who took a moment out of their day to kneel down and love our puppy. I heard some happy stories and some sad stoires and watched my little pup wiggle her way into each heart. I love that about raising a puppy.
Well, that's about the extent of the excitement this week. I'm hoping to get a few walks in the neighborhood in this weekend as there are quite a few houses with some new decorative lawn ornaments which will be great exposure for her.
Enjoy your holiday preparations !!
