Heart Like a Dog

The Good, the Bad, and the Oh My God of living with dogs!

Definitely – Barks and Bytes

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I know a lot of folks have already written about indoor games to play with your pups when the weather is bad. So if you want to skip this post, go right ahead.  Except you’ll probably miss some pretty funny shit, well at least you might giggle.  I’m not sure about shooting coffee out your nose funny, but you should definitely giggle.

Definitely.

We are currently in the midst of record cold.  I’d venture to include snow in there, but I know we’ve had winters where we’ve had more accumulation than this year, the difference being the frequency with which we’ve been getting snow.  Up until this week, it seemed we got at least 6 to 8 inches every few days.  (Honestly I do know some women who would be happy to get 6 to 8 inches on a regular basis, but this is a post about snow and bored dogs so let’s move along.)

But it does remind me of the story where the female news anchor, disappointed with the non-existent snow promised by the weather man, asked on the air, “So Dave, where is the eight inches you promised me last night?”

Bah dump dum!  I hear the newsroom dissolved in laughter and the female anchor turned fifty shades of red.  😉

Where was I before I distracted myself?

Oh yeah.

There have been a couple of sub-zero days when either the dogs or myself are unwilling to go outside to walk.  I’m good with that, but I still want to give them a bit of mind stimulation at the very least.  If not I could come home to a terrible mess because of a bored dog.  (Not saying who.)

Another poop post? When will you grow up?

Oh you’re NOT saying WHO, but my picture goes up!  Thanks Mama, thanks a lot.

I have a few boxes set aside to play scent work with when the weather is cold, so this week I broke out the boxes and we played some scent games in the house.

I use a small bowl to place the treat in, and then place the bowl inside the box.  This keeps 1) someone (see above) from eating the box and 2) also helps to keep the scent from attaching to the box and giving off a false positive.

I have sneaky little shits for dogs, and I had to keep being inventive of box placement because they kept peeking!   So the boxes moved from one place to another and another.  Eventually we wound up in the hallway.

At first I was using regular treats, but when we moved into the hallway I added (cover your eyes Emma) rabbit!

Coincidentally, there are four doors in the hallway and I had four receptacles for scent work.  I started out placing a box in each doorway and adding the treat to one of the boxes at the furthest end of the hall.

One of my dogs will sit patiently when you tell him to wait, the other one (not saying who) has to be held back.

I got a good thing going here. Thankyouverymuch.

Again? So this is where the saying, ” rolled under a bus” comes from?  What the woof Mama?

So there we are in the hall using the treats and I think to myself, hmmm I wonder what would happen if I set a piece of this rabbit jerky on the floor in the first doorway and another treat in the box at the end of the hall?

Two different dogs, two different results.

So what do you think happened? Let me know in the comments, I’ll share the rest of this tomorrow.

Heart Like a Dog

Welcome to Thursday’s Barks and Bytes hosted by 2 Brown Dawgs and Heart Like a Dog. The Barks and Bytes hop is for anything at all and all bloggers are welcome. You don’t have to be a dog blog to join. For new blog hoppers, a blog hop is list of links that is shared on multiple blogs. In order to be fair to all participants Linda and I ask you to please use the linky list. If your blog does not support a linky list, please link back to either Linda or I.

Dogs Are Like Teenagers

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One day, when my two oldest daughters were in 7th grade, Lynn asked if she could wear eye liner to school.

“Absolutely not,” I replied adamantly putting that silly notion to rest.

The next morning as I was driving them to school, I looked over at Lynn and she had eye liner on.

I blew a gasket.

“I thought I told you you couldn’t wear eye liner?” I asked angrily.

Lisa, her twin, and always the peace maker piped up from the back seat, “She was going to bring the eye liner to school and put it on in the bathroom Mom, I told her to just wear it and see what happened.”

Right then and there I realized, despite your desire to keep your children from doing something you don’t think they should, they are living growing beings and need to experience and learn in their own time.   I also decided I’d much rather have an honest, trusting relationship with my daughters, than have them sneaking around behind my back.

It would seem, the same holds true for your relationship with your dogs.

I was reminded of this story yesterday, after the dogs and I came back from our afternoon walk.

Please excuse while I attend to an important matter.

I’m sorry for what you are about to read.  I tried to stop her, I really did.

I put Sampson and Delilah in the back yard while I went about digging out some wood so I could stock the fire before I went back to work.

Neither one of the dogs had pooped on our walk (you can’t blame there, there really isn’t anywhere to go, unless it’s the street).  I should have kept that thought in the forefront of my mind, but I didn’t and went about the business of digging out the wood.  

I threw a few pieces onto the tarp and as I turned around, Sampson came bounding down the hill, doing his impression of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  

You know the part where Clarice kisses Rudolph and Rudolph flies through the air yelling, “She thinks I’m cute”? Sampson does something similar.  Except he does it after he takes a dump.  He’s all happy, like a great weight has been dropped, and he bounds joyfully.  Hubby and I always say, “I pooped, I pooped.”

So here comes Sampson bounding down the hill, I glance over at him then up to the deck where Delilah was just 5 seconds ago, only she’s not there.

My ‘mother intuition’ screams, turn around.  I do and there she is, up on the hill cleaning up after Sampson.

Hubby and I have been working hard at cleaning up after the dogs so there is nothing in the yard for her clean up.  I also am working her hard on our walks with the “leave it” command where she gets rewarded for not eating the disgusting stuff.

BUT it seems like the harder I try to keep her away from it, the sneakier she gets about trying to eat it.  

SO, The moral (if there is a moral) of this story is this:

Dogs, much like teenagers, are sneaky little shits.

There Are Times

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Sometimes walking my two wing-nuts is very stressful.  What should be a relaxing, enjoyable walk looks more like a three-ring circus and I come home feeling more tense then when we started.

Labs-in-snow

Stop your griping, you don’t see us barking about this weather.

Sampson thinks he’s the dog ambassador to every person he sees.  And he watches for them.  He can spot someone four houses away and then he gets a pep in his step and starts pulling like a sled dog.

Then there’s Delilah who is on the hunt for a crumb of anything she construes as food.  She would drag me through a snowbank if she could score a flake of tuna.

We are working on both these issues while walking, along with walking past other dogs.  Using food to help the dogs make the choices I want them to, comes with its own set of problems.

Remember that three-ring circus I mentioned?

I reach into my treat pouch and Delilah rushes over and tries to grab the treat as I’m pulling it out.  Sampson moves to get out of her way and a car is coming.  I’m trying to get the treat out of my treat bag, Delilah’s trying to get the treat, Sampson’s trying to get away from Delilah, a car is coming and I’m trying to get Sampson between the snowbank and me.

In between all this, there is usually a leash passed behind my back and yet, somehow someone always ends up with their leash stuck underneath someone else.

Sigh.

BUT then there are times where the walk is so enjoyable just because of something one of the dogs does, that it erases all that crazy.

Saturday afternoon it started snowing and it continued until yesterday afternoon.  All told we probably got another six to eight inches to add to the 3 1/2 feet already on the ground.  With the snowbanks on either side of the ride, it’s almost like walking in a tunnel.

A wind tunnel.

Yesterday afternoon about half way through our walk, the wind kicked up and starting blowing….leaves.  Don’t ask.  I have no idea where leaves could possibly come from considering all the snow we have.

Maybe someone female squirrel got pissed off because her mate didn’t clean off the nest and threw a few leaves (and his sorry ass) out into the snow, I don’t know.  All I know is all of a sudden there are leaves.

Leaves in snow

Do you see anywhere these leaves could have come from?

Leaves, blowing up the street.  I could see they were leaves, but Delilah could not.  All she could see was something on the ground moving very quickly.

Her body tensed, her head lifted and her ears perked.  She started moving a little faster, so I moved with her.

Lab sees blowing leaves

Wait. What is that?

These are the times when I wish I had strapped the Hubby’s Go Pro Camera to my chest.  The faster I moved, the faster she moved.  Sampson sensing her excitement increased his pace.

The leaf kept blowing, Delilah and Sampson kept chasing, but I couldn’t keep up.  Delilah was bucking like a bronco, and I was a laughing so hard, I almost fell down.

 Yes, there are times, times when they frustrate me beyond belief, but then there are other times (most of the time) when they bring so much joy and laughter into my life.

Have you ever laughed really hard at something your dog did?  I’d love to hear about it.

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