In Which Lolli Sticks Her Head Into the Lion's Mouth...

Meet Lolli's newest pal Athena!  Athena is a five month old great dane puppy, and she currently outweighs Lolli by roughly forty five pounds!  Despite the incredible difference in size, these two seem absolutely made to play together.  Athena is gentle, easygoing, patient and a bit clutzy, while Lolli is rough, frenetic, and somewhat crazy.  They balance each other perfectly.   Athena is so thick skinned (literally AND figuratively) that she seems able to take all sorts of nonsense from Lolli without fear or care.  Lolli reaps the benefit of the rough play that she loves without having a human bark "NO BITE" into her face every few seconds.  And Lolli's humans are just happy not to have those shark teeth clamping onto their exposed skin, for a little while at least!

Today Lolli is thirteen weeks old, and she sure has grown in the  four short weeks that we have had her!  She will have her third and final round of shots next week, at which point we should find out how much she weighs now, but I will venture to guess that she has gained at least three pounds, maybe more, since we got her.  She weighed a bit over eight pounds at that point, so I'm thinking she's probably in the twelve pound range today.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she doesn't turn into a "maxi" mini...time will tell!

Not only is Lolli growing physically, she is growing mentally as well.  She is inordinately clever and a great little problem solver...sometimes to my detriment, of course!  Thankfully she hasn't worked out the timing needed for jumping up onto the couch yet, although she has made it a few times by accident, and a few times by literally doing a "puppy pullup" (amazingly funny to watch!).  Mostly she just careens headlong toward the couch and throws herself at it with no real attempt at calculating a speed/height/jump ratio, and ends up bouncing off the seat cushions and flipping back onto her ass, bouncing off that, and starting the whole process over again.  This is most entertaining to watch.  

Lolli continues to work on her basic obedience skills and has a very solid mastery of sit, down, and paw (shaking hands), and is getting pretty good at "beg" and the take it/leave it game.  I am starting to teach her to roll over, since right now she doesn't mind being rolled onto her back.  However so far she seems to view this trick as more of me just messing with her than something I want her to on command, so often once the "roll" is complete, she leaps up and starts biting me like she will do to another dog that has just rolled her over.  At that point it gets very hard to recapture any kind of focus!  Our big upcoming project is "leash training 101", and I confess that I am nervous.   I think leash training is one of the toughest things to teach because it's not a natural thing for a dog to walk calmly by your left side, and despite reading  up on several methods of teaching, I think it's going to be a real challenge.  Still, she is super smart, and I think that together we can find a way to make it work!

$100 Worth of Toys, but I Prefer Junk...

You probably can't see this photo very well on the blog, so I will tell you why it's great...it's a panned motion shot, but Lolli's eye is in focus.  While I know how to produce this shot in theory, the reality is that it rarely works out this well for me.  So go ahead and admire...

Allow me to point out the irony of purchasing roughly $100 in puppy toys, only to find that the stick on the lawn is way more appealing to the puppy!  Incidentally, if any of you ever allow your dog to play with a stick, ALWAYS make them hold it in the middle.  Dogs can and do get injured by running with the end in their mouths. 

Lolli, Miguel and I just got back from a little shopping expedition, and she is currently passed out in her crate.  Here's what I'm struggling with this week...Lolli is only on her second round of shots, and a puppy's immunity isn't considered reliable until around two weeks after her third round, which she will have in about two weeks.  This causes a dilemma for me...obviously my first priority is keeping her healthy and safe, and this means keeping her relatively isolated from the outside world until her shots give her some decent immunity.  However, in these weeks of her life, a puppy is particularly impressionable and it's a fairly essential time to introduce her to new situations and new people.  A puppy needs socialization to make her well rounded and to help her learn to accept new situations with ease.  So the question is, how do you take advantage of this impressionable period and get her as socialized as possible, while protecting her from all the yucky germs out there?  

After much thought, discussions with my friend K, advice from Lolli's veterinarian, and a lot of reading, I've decided upon a very cautious compromise.  Lolli gets to accompany me to places where there are likely to be people, but she is allowed no contact with strange dogs.  She is allowed to hang out and play with dogs that I know for a fact are fully vaccinated...for example, Toby and Yoggie (Dana's dog).  Until she gets that third round of shots, there is no dog park, no doggie day care, and no walking around in dog-intensive stores such as Petsmart (we went in once but I carried her the whole time - won't even put her in a cart).  My reasoning, although possibly flawed, runs like this - we could keep her completely isolated at home, but Miguel, Toby and I all go out into the world, and we bring it home with us on our feet and clothing.  So to offer her total isolation, we'd have to stop going out as well, and stop allowing Toby out, which just isn't realistic.  So we allow her in places least likely to cause problems, carefully monitor anywhere we allow her to walk (keeping her well away from poop and any other debris), and I wash her feet and legs down with antibacterial wipes when we get home.  I'm trying to optimize socialization while minimizing germy dangers.

Today we went to Baja Fresh for lunch, where they have an outdoor patio and Lolli could hang out with us while we ate.  I kept her on a very short leash by my chair, and to my delight, she behaved beautifully.  After scouting the immediate area allowed to her by the leash (roughly four square feet), she quickly learned that random treats would come her way if she were sitting or lying down.  Soon she was presenting both of these behaviors, and like a slot machine, sometimes it resulted in a pay out for her.  We were able to relax and enjoy our lunch, and she is on her way to learning that allowing us to relax and enjoy  our lunch can result in some tasty bits of love sent her way.  Win/win, all the way!

We are continuing to reinforce her efforts at the sit and down commands...she is really figuring out that offering a sit is like saying "please", and when in doubt, she often turns to it as a means of getting something she wants.  Smart girl!  She does a good "down", but pops right up if a treat isn't immediately forthcoming, so this week we will be working on getting her to focus on maintaining the position a little longer.  She is also getting a nice reliable "paw" going, which is the word we decided on for having her shake hands (paws).  She was a bit confused at first, since usually every time I put my hand in front of her, it has a treat in it.  Now she is starting to understand that if the hand comes without a treat, putting her paw on that hand will result in the magical appearance of said treat.  It's funny to watch her think it over...she looks at the hand, sniffs a little to see if there's a treat she doesn't see, and then you can almost see the pieces fit into place as she shifts her weight back so she can offer up a paw.  She's eleven weeks old tomorrow...not too bad for a creature who's been on this planet a total of seventy-seven days!

We have also started the home education class that I like to call "Leash Training 101".  We are working on only the most basic step right now.  I take her to a room or somewhere outside where there are few distractions, and I put the leash on her.  Then I step back a bit, and put slight pressure on her collar with the lead.  The instant she looks at me or moves closer to me in a way that eases the pressure on her collar, it's "goooood  girl" and treat.  The idea here is to teach her that any time she feels pressure on her collar, the correct thing to do is to move towards me, rather than away.  Hopefully this will help us to forever avoid the "sled dog" move, in which the dog feels pressure, and so tries to pull away from the pressure.  We always say "if only they would stop pulling, there would be no pressure" while the dog is thinking "something is pulling on my neck...I must pull away to get rid of it."  I think avoiding this is the first step to some really good leash work!  I'll keep you posted, of course!