Week 12: The Monster (and first pointed bird)
Oh. Em. Gee.
Someone stole my adorable, sleepy, cuddly puppy and replaced her with an absolute monster. For some reason, the 12 week mark seems to be the drop of the hammer that turns cute little rats into energy laden, everything chewing, dog torturing monsters. She just wont stop. She never gets tired. She never needs a break. She is just… non stop! Holy crap. What do I do with this thing!? And she destroys all beds. She’s figured out that they contain cool fluff, and they are SUPER fun to remove the guts from. So I put this “indestructible bed” in her kennel… yea….
Setter Puppy: 1 Indestructible bed: 0
We still work twice a day: morning is some sort of “training”, and evening is a long walk with the other dogs in the orchard. We are also working on the small stuff, like not blasting through doors until released, and also using the elevated table for standing practice and what the Upland Institute program calls “The Calming Touch”, which is basically just teaching your dog to stand still while you examine them, put on collars, and all the other tail gate stuff that eventually you want a dog that knows how to stand for.
So this week, I decided to plant a bird for her (video link below). She has seen about a dozen pigeons fly off by now, but never “found” one on her own. So I slept a pigeon by tucking its head under its wing, and planted it in the orchard up wind of our walking path. When she smelled it, she immediately put her nose to the ground and tried to figure out what that was. She had no idea that smell ended in a bird at this point, so she was sniffing sprinklers, dirt, almonds, grass clumps trying to identify it, all while creeping closer and closer to the growing scent.
When she got close to it, she looked up…. and locked! It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. A 12 week old puppy just locked in on the bird. We stood there for 30 seconds or so, and then when I took a step toward the bird, so did she. She crept in, and when she sniffed it, it woke up and flew away. HOW AWESOME!!! I caught that whole last piece on camera, and here is the video:
After spending the last 2 years with Thelma, who would either blink the birds, or if planted, crash in and eat them, this was about the coolest moment of my dogging career so far.
I am super stoked to get this one out and about this coming season!