14 Navy Seals deployed at 8.30am today at Virginia Water. They weren’t particularly stealthy though. 🥷
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it’s another hot one here 🥵! Early start, early finish, plenty of swimming and back in a cold air conditioned car before lunch!
Finally, just before the end of May, some SUNSHINE! I was wondering if the rain would ever stop! Roll on summer.... ☀️
(The Return of) The Great Gatsby
Gatsby the GSP came for b&t in Jan 2020 and things had apparently been going great since. But a couple of months ago there was an incident which set the whole family back. They were out on a family walk when a mastiff/corso dog charged up to them out of nowhere and set on Gatsby. Dad stepped in and successfully protected his wife, baby and dog, but took the brunt of the attack himself and got badly mauled in the process. This has left a shaken-up family and a (sometimes) reactive dog.
We’re half way into week one of his refresher Board & Train and Gatsby is already doing really well. But there’s plenty to do here in terms of finding out what his new triggers are, how to advocate for him effectively and walk him through them. As ever I have the help of a team of the best role models!
Repetition creates an unsaid expectation/rule.
E.g. Any door being opened is not an automatic invitation for your dog to do anything.
It’s got to be one of the most important safety protocols for any dog to learn and it comes with plenty of repetition. It shouldn’t be necessary for you to say ‘stay, stay, staaaaaaay....’ every time you open your boot lid one inch at a time whilst crouching down to physically block your dog from leaping out. Your dog should understand that unless you have invited him out, there is no invitation. This one is potentially a life saver.
Whether it’s the front door to your house or your car boot lid, this is one to learn and practise so that it becomes such an entrenched habit that it’s an unsaid expectation.
Hazel the GSP, (board & train) is learning how to self-regulate those spring-loaded emotions.
It’s not an overnight trick such as ‘sit/down/paw’ etc. Once a dog figures out a new trick, he can reproduce it fairly quickly. Self-control though is more of a marathon than a sprint. Mental stamina takes time to build, just as physical stamina does. And it needs plenty of practise and repetition. With perseverance though, you can teach your dog ‘calm on command’ and expect their butt to stay firmly planted.
Remember the 3 D’s:
Duration
Distance
Distractions.
Build all three day by day and you’ll bomb proof your dog.
It’s that rainy Friday feeling... ☔️ 💤 😴
🦊 MAJOR cute alert.... 🦊
Truman the English Shorthaired Pointer is with me for a couple of weeks Board & Train for a general long list of feral unruliness 🤪. More about him in another post.
Yesterday morning we were out in the garden and he followed his nose over to a bush, and in true Pointer style lifted up his front leg, tail out straight, head perfectly still and ‘pointed’. Text book breed behaviour for having seen a bird / small animal in the undergrowth. So I went over to see what he was staring at, and out crawled this tiny brown fluffy thing.
Fox cub 🦊 , about 10 days old, way too young to be out of the den (normally about 3 weeks before they emerge above ground), so something, somehow has gone wrong for this little fella. They can’t thermoregulate at that age, and still very reliant on his mum’s milk every few hours... so I left it alone in the hope that mum would return. Five hours later it was still there, so I gave him a drop of rainwater in case he was dehydrated and phoned Harper Asprey Wildlife Rescue, and he is now with them being bottle fed and kept safe. 🙏
Truman - all is forgiven. You redeemed yourself in true Pointer style.
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🤫 Shh... It’s never about decibels. 🤫
It’s always about the relationship. If you find yourself routinely yelling at your dog, it’s not a volume control issue, it’s a relationship issue. If you have a good relationship with your dog then chances are he’ll voluntarily listen. And if your dog is listening to you... a whisper will do.
🤫