We met with a different trainer and she was a lot easier to talk to. We still had the impression that we need to separate the dogs AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE so we have worked on that some more. Our walks always include at least half the walk separated and we also do periodic “playtimes” in the yard with a special toy with just one dog at a time. And we re-introduced kennels rather than beds in the living room.
Stony, however, has almost zero interest in toys. He might play tug for a few minutes but that’s about it when it comes to playing with humans and toys. He does play a lot with Woody though. We see them chasing each other around the yard playing “keep away” with a toy or stick or whatever regularly.
We have the dogs on a waiting list for a day of “tutoring” at the canine center which would be ideal as it would be a day to separate them and also get some kind of “tutoring”. But no openings in sight. So recently we dropped Stony off at “Stay ‘n Play” which went just about as we expected: he was completely terrified and never interacted with any of the staff (he was scheduled to have some playtime with a person). Walking into the kenneling area with all the other dogs barking and stuff was alone completely traumatizing for him. So we picked him up a bit early to reduce the time he spent suffering! We chose Stony first as we knew he is more high-strung and suffers more from separating from his littermate.
In another experiment, we took Woody out with us to a brewery (Vista Brewing in Driftwood) which is nearby. As we walked out to the picnic table, he was freaking out and didn’t even want to walk! There were a lot of people, kids, and dogs spread around the outdoor area. Then, once we got him to the table he was all nervous and barking occasionally and all that stuff. Finally he calmed down and we gave him a chew. So it worked, but not totally smooth.
Since we had Woody in the car, we stopped for a tourist pic in Driftwood since that’s his namesake!
We plan to try Stony at the same brewery tomorrow, which is a Tuesday, with the hope that it will be sparsely attended so he won’t be overwhelmed by all the stimulation.
When lolling around the house we often refer to Woody as a “sea cow” due to his bratwurst-like-body. Another other trait he frequently displays is “irrational exuberance”. Any little thing that seems exciting at ALL causes him to jump up and bite on things (us). This includes but is not limited to:
one of us walking into the living room after being gone over 5 minutes
walking with a pail (ask Rob)
changing any part of your clothing
making an unusual sound
one of us calling Stony.
Woody is also causing a hassle because he will pee when we tell him “NO”. That’s really annoying and we thought by now he would quit doing that. We try to do a lot of positive things with him and praise him when he is good, but I mean you have to say “NO” once in a while! Then he just pees all over :(
Last observation about thee dogs is something I often repeat to them on walks:
“those aren’t treats, that’s deer poop”
We tried out Suds Monkey Brewery recently, which is like a 5 minutes drive from here, (sans dogs) and sampled their pizza. It was pretty good so we are basically surrounded by nice breweries :)
I also discovered a sort of hidden path that leads out of our neighborhood on a far side, not near the entrance by the main road. So if you take this path and then keep going along an actual road, you get to JESTER KING! So that’s cool but the only thing is it probably would take about an hour to walk there from our house. So we may do this sometime and plan to spend a couple hours there in afternoon and walk back. One might consider riding a bike, but the trick is that it has to fit between two narrowly placed walls surrounding the path.
We have some veggies growing but we have no idea if they’ll work out. Well except the lettuce that we’ve already had a lot of. For a sneak peek, we pulled some carrots a bit early and saw they were minuscule and decided it was because we never bothered to thin them after planting. Noted!
A couple more pics below.
