Time to Go

Figgy had been doing pretty well, not the easiest puppy, but nothing outrageous. In fact, her breeder was up visiting just a few weeks ago, everything was fine. The plan was to keep her for a few more months, maybe do some agility foundation with her. She was finally getting food motivated, so we were going to start training cute tricks and body awareness. And then this week happened – and, yeah, time for puppy to go home now.

To be fair, she’s not doing anything out of the ordinary for a puppy, she’s not a bad dog. If she were my dog, it would be annoying, but, yeah everything can be dealt with in time. But there was a flurry of puppy behavior I just don’t want to do deal with, including a sudden and intense fascination with eating shit. It happens with puppies, but Fig has had zero interest in poo … until this week, when suddenly she is not only eating it, but eating so much she’s making herself sick. I mean, seriously? There are four dogs in this household, it’s not hard to find shit. So, yeah, not charming AT ALL.

Then the rains have started, and Figgy took this as magic from the gods for making all parts of the yard nice and diggable – giant mud craters EVERYWHERE. And, of course, all over the dog who wants to come into my house and smears it all over the patio door. She already ate a large percentage of my baby plants, I’d like to keep my remaining ones – and not have a giant mud pit for a yard.

And all of the sudden she’s decided that food is valuable, and I could have food, therefore she must go after any dog that gets near me to protect her now valuable food. She’s not discriminating either, she’ll take on full grown adults. Yeah, not charming either.

And, finally, by just bodily throwing herself at the wall in the arena, she can now ‘get over’ the 3 foot barrier in the most dangerous and frightening way, throwing her body up and over, dragging her rear legs behind her and falling to the concrete on the other side. And once she learned she could do that move, she kept doing it. Which is just Fig in general, she has no regard for her body and I don’t want her to break herself on my watch.

So, yeah, and then there’s the fact we already working on fixing her biting the other dogs when over-aroused (and she IS better!), these are all fixable, but very much NOT FUN puppy issues that require a lot of management and work. The cuteness has officially worn off, she is suddenly more work than I’m prepared to deal with this winter. In the space of week she went from ‘fine’ to ‘obnoxious puppy’.

We don’t have an official date for her return to California, but it will be soon. And we will miss her, she really is a nice puppy – but I also think we’re all about ready for some puppy-free time at this point. We did do two puppies this year, and that’s a lot. The dogs have been tolerant and very good with the pups, but they’re ready to take center stage again.

We did go to an AKC trial last weekend. Just standard and jumpers, which seemed like plenty as we’re easing back into things. It’s fun to run Bright and Navarre on the same course, especially when they both do well – Navarre is edging ever closer to Bright’s times. I thought he would have beaten her in standard today with his running dogwalk, but, no, it wasn’t by much, but she still beat his time (though she knocked a bar, so technically he won!). In jumpers, once again they were very close – but Bright edged him out again. Never underestimate efficiency.

I’m getting easy to please, both courses had one part that I wanted to try to get in a blind cross with both dogs down stream – and I’m happy to say I got it on both courses with both dogs. As long as a course has one thing that makes me wonder if I can do it a certain way, I’m happy. And then all the big long extension loops make the dogs happy, so it’s all good. We had fun, and it helps we’ve been on break, I just appreciate being able to run my dogs in the COOL weather.

Really happy with both dogs, they did some really nice stuff and other than Bright’s knocked bar and Navarre’s enthusiastic tunnel off course they did awesome. Navarre even got a double Q, which doesn’t happen often with Sir Runs Around Obstacles – which even got him high in trial! Very proud of the baby dog, and cool that PAC gives out embroidered fleeces for their awards – you can never have too many fleeces for my money. I liked coming for just standard and jumpers, and our next trial we’re just going for premier in the morning – I could get used to this schedule.

Then it’s supposed to be 85 degrees all week. I’m not amused.