We’ve been practicing recall at dog parks in hopes that someday Mississippi can be off leash without fences. She’s getting much better at it. She even went running after someone else who had whistled on the other side of the dog park. She thought it was my whistle and was all confused when she got there and I was no where to be found. She saw us waving and burned tanbark running back to us at full speed. She seems to stay a little closer to us now when we do loops around the park. Of course the amount of distractions definitely play a part. If it’s just us three in the park, she stays pretty close. If there are other dogs, she’ll stray for longer and farther. Looking back at 3 months ago, I feel pretty proud that she is where she is now. We used to have to just wait for her to get worn out before we could catch her and get a leash on her.
We are having less luck with “drop it.” She likes to grab things and play keep away. She grabs very bad things, stuff that she knows will make our blood boil. The other day, she grabbed a piece of wood that used to be attached to the house. When she presented it to me and I didn’t get upset, she went and found something worse. She still doesn’t seem to understand that when she steals stuff, fun gets taken away from her. This weekend she stole my bell pepper plant, one that I had grown from seed. It had a nice little bell pepper growing on it too. She steals trash out of the waste basket in our room, she steals socks, shoes, mail, anything within her reach basically. This weekend at the dog park, someone had dropped a plastic bag on the ground. She went for it and refused to give it up. I tried sweet talking, I tried to get her to sit, and I tried to just flat out grab her. She is too fast for us. she chewed and swallowed it. That ended doggy park fun for the day. I don’t really know what to do except trying to do treat exchanges for things. She is a real brat when it comes to this keep away stuff. Treats often don’t work because sometimes she is hell bent on keeping whatever it is she’s got. She does it for attention and I’m sure it also has something to do with her wanting us to know she’s the empress of the house. I start a new class next Wednesday. Maybe they can help us with our keep away problem.
We’ve noticed that lately Mississippi barks way less at other dogs when we are in the car. Our ears thank her. She unfortunately found a cat in our backyard on Friday so now every time we let her out, she runs silently around the backyard tried to catch that pesky cat. After she’s checked out the scene, she’s all worked up and the random barking begins. It makes it very hard to let her out in the morning. Sometimes if she has to go, I’ll put her on leash to take her out back. Hopefully the cat has learned to stay out of our yard and Mississippi will eventually calm down.
I know I shouldn’t have bought fireworks with a new dog at home. I guess I’m a bad person. I half thought we’d go to some parking lot somewhere to set them off. But our neighbors wanted to have some fun in the driveway. So I don’t know, we just went for it. I figured if Mississippi was too scared, we could stop. To our amazement, she really didn’t care about the fireworks. I think she spent some time in the basement but when we came in to check on her, she cheerily came running up the stairs to say hi. She was her normal sweet self. After we were done with our own fireworks show, we hung out in the backyard with her. She hung out on the grass, happily chewing on her stick as bottle rockets flew overhead from the next street over. She didn’t even flinch. What a weirdo. It surprised us because she goes nuts over remote controlled planes. Go figure.
And just for fun… a stroller pushing pug: