Walking with two reactive dogs isn’t easy. Sampson reacts to everything. He sees a person he wants to greet them. He sees a dog he wants to greet them. He sees a car parked on the side of the road and he wants to look inside it to see if there is a person or a dog that he can greet.
Delilah reacts differently. Mostly I find her reacting to dogs who are reacting. It also depends on the proximity of the dog. For instance a dog far off in their back yard who is barking their head off is easy to walk past. A dog who is right at the front of the yard, is not as easy.
I’ve been working on different things with the dogs. For one I’ve been using “Look” to distract them, when they look to me I treat them, and keep pulling out the treats as we walk past the distraction.
Truthfully Delilah’s far easier to distract with a treat than Sampson is, but this past weekend I decided to add something new in. Two or three times per walk I “Heel” the dogs. I say “Heel”, shorten both their leashes and with one on either side of me walk past a house. Once past the house I treat them both and release them to go about their sniffing business.
So far we have only “Heeled” past people working outside, but having both dogs focused on me has made me a feel a little more comfortable and made our walks a bit more enjoyable for me.
So much so that I can enjoy a bit of the scenery.
A few years back we had a heavy snowfall at the end of October. Some people call it “Snowtober” while others called it “Frankenstorm”. Regardless what we called it, the snowstorm dumped lots of heavy, wet snow and caught many of our trees still with lots of leaves. The heavy, wet snow on the leaves brought down so many trees, and left most of our area without power for a week to ten days. In fact, the area was declared a disaster zone.
Since that storm, I’ve been very observant of the trees and their leaves. The trees held on to their leaves quite late this year.
Even now, some of the trees are hanging on to their leaves.
In general I’ve been watching the Japanese maples. I was wondering when they’d be dropping their leaves.
Finally, yesterday I was rewarded.
The red of the leaves is a different shade of red than the tradition maples.
The Japanese maples leave a beautiful red carpet wherever they fall.
Mixed with other leaves, the Japanese Maple beckoned me to take a closer look.
So I did.
The leaf reminded me of a beautiful flower.
How do you enjoy your walks? Do you dogs behave enough for you to enjoy the scenery?
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