Welcome to this week’s edition of Co-hosted Follow-Up Friday.

This week I’m excited to welcome my friend Kari, from Hound Girl as my co-hostess.  You may or may not know that Kari was instrumental in the design of this blog.  I mentioned to her I wanted to go self-hosted but needed a redesign and BOOM she took off  running with it.  I am forever in her debt.

Kari took a hiatus from blogging for a while, after the unexpected passing of her muse, Fred.  During this time she also had a baby,  Kylie.  She’s back now and raring to go.  I’m so excited to see Hound Girl in my reader when I sign in.  If you haven’t ‘met’ Kari and Haylie (her lab) please stop on over and tell her Jodi sent you.

I was thrilled to be able to meet Kari at BlogPaws and while I didn’t get to spend as much time with her as I would have liked, it was still amazing to be able to spend time with incredible, smart, funny woman.

Please join me in welcoming my friend, Kari Pike.

You Make Me Laugh

Jan said, “I always wonder what dogs have in mind (and yes I do think there is a doggie logic in everything they do) when they do the rear action thing. Are they trying to get rid of the evidence or are they scattering it so it has the most impact for future smellers of the doggie news.”

I have no idea, I’ve heard everything from they are expressing their anal glands, to covering their scent to dominance.  If anyone ever gets inside their head, I bet we’d learn a LOT.

The Post in Which I Speak Deer

Peggy asked, “How far did they run after the deer before giving up?”

They ran into the woods about 30 yards or so and then came back.  They are more visual so once they got in there and couldn’t see the deer they came right back.

Animal Couriers asked, “How long did it take Delilah to come back?”

You know, she constantly surprises me.  I’ve been working her on a “Go Check” command where I un-clip her leash and let her investigate something of interest.  With the deer, she ran into the woods, checked it out and came right back.  We of course did NOT have a similar success the next day.  (More on that next week.)

2 Brown Dawgs said, “You have smart deer there that know “stop”. Maybe they could help train brown dawgs? ”

Umm, I’m pretty sure your Brown Dawgs could teach my guys a thing or two! 🙂

Gizmo said, “Gizmo once took off after a deer, running as fast as his short little legs allowed…The deer actually slowed down, turned around and looked at him …You could just hear the deer saying “You have got to be kidding me!”

I could just picture that.

Just One Day

I’m still waiting for totals to post to see how many animals were saved.  Initial reports are amazing.  Next year I plan to post about this much earlier so those of  you who wish to participate can do so as well.

2 Brown Dawgs said, ” I am torn on this topic.  So many times “no kill” rescues dump their unadoptable dogs at humane societies and/or shelters. Then the shelter or humane society must be the bad guy.”

Yes that’s true and I should have clarified, Just One Day is asking shelters to pledge not to kill any saveable animals.

The only picture I have where she even remotely resembles a puppy.

Isn’t she adorbs?

Standing Outside the Fire

Okay, I’ll agree with you all on one thing, it was a good choice of song.  The rest of it sucked!  But you all had great encouraging words for us.

Truly I am not disappointed.  This was a six week course and I admit I didn’t practice a whole lot at home and it was our first time in the center of the room.  A couple of us learned some things about our dogs.

We had one woman and I’m assuming it was her daughter (I’d say she’s about 10) and their dog Jessie, who were doing awesome on the sidelines.  But once they made it to the center of the room Jessie just shut down.  She was so overwhelmed and her little handler tried everything she could to get her focused, but she couldn’t.  Ariane suggested moving to the side to try again, but the young lady was so frustrated she sat in tears.

Oakley is a beautiful Ridgeback and his owner works super hard with him.  In fact, in our video if you look over to your right, you can see her practicing with him.  He did great in the center but at the end of the performance when everyone started clapping, he took off running around the room.

I do want to practice this routine a little bit more at home and see if Hubby will record it for us. The beginning of the video was cut off, Delilah started across the room and came to front and then we high fived before we went into walking/weaves and spinning.

In my ideal routine, we will be on opposite sides of the ring, will bow to each other and then she will come to front and we will high five.  The bit at the end where she jumps up on me, will be a kiss.

Sugar asked, “Maybe we missed it … what’s the reason for having the leash?”

The facility where we take classes is not a traditional facility.  The organization is still fairly young and so we don’t have the typical partitions/dividers that a more established facility has.  So unless you are 100% sure that you have your dog under control (s)he has to be on leash.

Um, I gotta wrap this up. It’s over 1,000 words. 🙁 I’ll be answering comments from yesterday’s post directly.

Thanks for joining Hound Girl and Heart Like a Dog for Follow-Up Friday.