3rd poopy time is the charm

Well, it was another POOPY day for us today! I am dog sitting my friends 10 week old mix of some sort...Rook!

Rook and Goose get along pretty well usually, but they do have similar strong personalities and can clash a bit at times. At one point my friend had to grab Goose who looked like he was out for blood. After that we payed better attention to their play and interrupted anything questionable. Since then they have been playing much better. Rook helped us work on Gooses resource guarding too. We tried hand feeding them next to each other but Rook wasn't hungry, so we put Rook on a leash and walked him up to and around Goose, and every time Rook approached and got close to Goose I would feed him turkey. When Rook got farther away the turkey stopped. We repeated the exercise, with Goose chewing a rawhide, and getting turkey when Rook got close. My friend also did some trading games with him, which he was pretty good with. When she reached down from behind him to take the bone, he did stiffen up a bit, but gave it up with out a fight. So Goose's guarding from people, which never really was too bad, is almost gone. His guarding from dogs, is MUCH better. He can share food off the floor with Billy and Bucky, he can sit close to Billy and take food pretty calmly, and he can chew on a bone in my hand with Billy lying close by. What we observed yesterday, is that when he has something he thinks is special and another dog (Rook in this case) is threatening it, he will pick it up and run away. Sometimes he will growl as he turns away, but this is MUCH better than before when he would just go straight to snapping. I really don't care if my dogs guard from other dogs, I think its totally natural for them to want to protect what they have, but I do not want Goose to go for the jugular just because someone comes too close. Warning and fleeing is appropriate in my opinion. If a dog continues to not respect my dogs warnings, then I can step in and help them. I mean in a perfect world all dogs would give up prized toys and bones with out a fight, but lets face it, they are dogs and they are selfish.

Puppies playing!Goose is starting to LOVE fetch!! He's getting good at it too! He's about 90% with bringing things back outside.

Now for the poopy part of the day... my friend and I took the puppies and Billy outside to potty and play in the baby pool and soon Billy was bored and began to explore the border of our yard next to the woods. Billy often goes into the woods for a minute or two and will pop out fifty yards to the left or right where he went it. So I was calling his name just in case he felt like coming out early (not using his recall because I had a feeling he was not coming til he was done following his trail). Of course he didn't. So after a minute or two passed I started to wonder where he was, and then all of a sudden he came happily trotting out of the woods. I looked down at him when he got to us and had to laugh. There was a huge smear of what had to be fresh poop, all along his neck. I guess he was jealous that Goose got a bath yesterday and he didn't!! Bath time for Billy it was! Come on doggies I can only take so many poopy adventures in one week!Poopy Billy


Here is the link to video of Goose doing his tricks at 3 months

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSO6E9BiuNI