The Madness

One thing about Buffy – she’s good at being calm, she’s good at snuggling and cuddling up on the couch and being in general adorably cute.

But she also has The Madness.

Now, The Madness mainly manifests itself when she’s in the park, and I have finally managed to capture this on video which you can see at the end of this post. But it also sometimes appears when she’s annoyed that we don’t want to play with her…which usually involves running at full pelt around our living room, which has maybe 5 feet of clear running space. The result is mainly amusing, unless she decides to run up and down the couch and you happen to be sitting in her path…her claws are SHARP even right after being cut.

She also likes to tear around madly when she’s just out of the bath. Wet Dog, who is even smaller than Buffy and hilarious looking, tries to rub off the water on every surface she can find, while at the same time running as fast as she can from one end of the room to the other.

But really, The Madness is best explained through experiencing it, so I give you:

THE MADNESS!!!!! (dun dun duuuuhhhhhh!)

Dog Smell

Buffy doesn’t smell like Dog.

In fact another dog owner even commented on it once, in the park.

We were very determined, from the moment we got her, that she (and our house!) would be free from that doggy odour, that unpleasantly canine, muddy, sweaty, doggy smell.  And we’ve managed it mostly so far – given Buffy’s obsession with mudholes and the english weather, we’ve given her any number of baths, and she’s gotten better and better at just standing there and putting up with the indignity of getting *wet* (in fact, better than she puts up with rain. When it rains, she hates going outside, and rather than galavant in the muddy ground (which she delights in doing once the rain has stopped), she stands next to us miserably, refusing to run around at all, and periodically scrabbling at our legs, asking to be picked up.  Pathetic little wuss that she is…).

But somehow, for the last few weeks she’s been mud free, and generally maintained a reasonable level of cleanliness that has not required a bath. So she’s not had one for some time. And it turns out, when not bathed once a week…she smells!

Oh, not badly…in fact I kind of like it, it’s very familiar and nice. But it is definite Dog Odour. So a bath is in the works, though it seems a bit of a shame to waste the effort when she’s not covered head to toe in mud!

This is what passes for interesting in the world of dog ownership. I’m just sayin.

Expect the Unexpected

Last night, we had buffy in bed and were marvelling at her cuteness, as per usual. Then I left the room for a bit, and all of a sudden I heard laughter and commotion coming from the bedroom. Louie shortly informed me that Buffy, in all her cute glory, had strode to the foot of the bed, popped a squat, and peed to her heart’s content.

Now let me just interject here to say that Buffy has taken to house training excellently. She hasn’t peed in the house in at least a month, aside from an accidental drop here or there when she’s been desperate to pee and on her way out of the crate or out the door. She has a pee spot outside the house. She goes to the bathroom at least 6 times a day, and always right when I get home from work at 7:30ish (for a nice half hour or more walk) and right before sleep at 11. Last night she’d been out for a long walk, she’d been played with and cuddled, and she was lying in bed with us, a place she very regularly falls asleep. Before last night, she’d never peed anywhere raised from the ground (ie she hasn’t peed on the couch or the chair). And she hasn’t peed in the house at all unless I did something wrong (ie didn’t watch her or didn’t take her out enough) since we started potty training in earnest at about 14 weeks.

So with all that context in your head, perhaps you can understand why we were somewhere between laughter and tears as we dealt with my pee-soaked (well, the corner was) duvet and discovered layer upon layer that her pee had penetrated…right down to the mattress. She went into her crate for the night, and we changed the sheets, got out the spare duvet, flipped the mattress and generally went through quite a lot of trouble cleaning up after her one little pee. Of course this morning she was back in bed with us…but (theoretically) more tightly controlled. We reason that since she sleeps up near our heads mostly, she came to regard the foot of the bed as a play area and that’s why she wasn’t against peeing in a place where she sleeps. So we’re keeping hold of her and keeping her at the top of the bed for now. But even a bit of pee isn’t enough to put us off the cuteness, which we were once again marvelling at this morning.

However, we discussed it last night. If she poops in our bed, that’s it – no more bed for buffy.

Probably.

Puppy training – beating the unbeatable foe

News that a fox has attacked two 9month old babies on east london last night making me feel my ‘run and hide’ decision when confronted with the fox while walking Buffy was one of my better ones.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/10251349.stm

In other news, Buffy is growing. Like, HUGE! She’s enormous! She’s colossal! She’s like…the size of a cat! But with longer, spindly-er legs.  And much cuter.  Much, much, cuter. She’s like a walking black hole of cuteness – her Cute Density Measure (that’s a thing!) is too high for her to exist in this dimension.

It remains a bit of a mystery to me how Buffy can continue to be so cute, when she is very obviously leaving her puppy days behind her. Not that you can tell from her training…this weekend we were walking in the park with another dog owner, a much better trainer as evidenced by the fact that she could say one word and her dog would trot next to her for ages, not darting ahead or trying to eat rubbish or dancing around in a circle singing ‘look at me, look at me!’ (cough Buffy cough cough). To be honest I didn’t even know that you COULD train a dog to do that, so I haven’t been trying…though know that I know you can, I still have no idea how to go about making it happen.

I have made various training gambits. Buffy knows sit, she knows come, she knows stay. The problem is less getting her to recognize these words and know what she’s meant to do when I say them…the problem is in getting her to decide to subsequently DO those things! Currently, she’s against sitting. If I’m not holding a bag of treats in my hands at the exact moment I ask her to sit, she’s not interested. Sometimes having the leash in my hand works instead, but only sometimes.  And there’s no question in my mind that she knows what I want her to do. She just chooses not to, when treats are not involved.

She also knows some more advanced commands.  She knows Down, which means she should get down from the coffee table. She’s pretty reliable at this one…but of course, it means she’s already gotten UP onto the coffee table!  I’ve tried to teach her not to jump up, but honestly, how do you teach a puppy NOT to do something without being negative? Every book and obedience class agrees – negative attention is still attention to a dog, and doesn’t discourage behavior. What they fail to explain, however, each and every one of them – is how in the world I can get my puppy to stop jumping up on my coffee table! One book provided this gem: to get her to stop jumping up to the table, don’t ever put any food or anything attractive or interesting on it. Then, she won’t want to jump up!

Leaving aside the fact that we eat at the coffee table most days because we live in a london apartment and therefore have no room – surely coffee tables are meant for keeping things on! Even just for example, coffee table books? (not that we have those, but it’s the principle!)  Or, indeed, coffee!!!

Dog training manual FAIL.

But that’s not to say she hasn’t made progress. She now comes almost every time we call.  And the times when she doesn’t come, when she’s so engrossed in chasing a bird or butterfly or leaf – we just run the other way yelling “Bye bye Buffy!!” and she comes tearing after us. Because despite her refusal to listen to what we say or do what we want – she still loves us very much and can’t bear the thought of losing sight of us. And I guess that’s all I need from a dog, really.

Out-foxed

Two posts in two days – I’m shockingly prolific today but just HAD to record recent puppy events.

Inexplicably Buffy woke up at 2:30 am and barked me awake, desperate to go pee. She did a nice little accidental pee as she got out of her crate, but managed to generally hold it until we got outside (which took me a bit…I couldn’t find my purse or any keys or my shoes, and I couldn’t get her little poo bag holder working…it was 2:30am! Who knows how I managed to do that waking up at 3 or 4am thing for her first three weeks!).  She did a nice little pee, and then she went a sniffing for what I assumed was a nice little poo. But as we got halfway across the driveway that’s in front of our apartment building (she likes to walk from one end to the other several times, just to annoy me, before she’ll do her nice little squat and poo), she suddenly started to bark. As this is an extraordinarily unusual event for her, I first shushed her but then tried to see what she’d been barking at…and it was a fox! A nice city fox had been standing at the far end of the driveway (right where I was heading) and I hadn’t even noticed him against the red brick wall.  When Buffy barked, he bolted, but didn’t go far – he stopped in the middle of the street, and looked back at us, realized that we were only a tiny shrimp of a puppy dog and an unintimidating looking human, and started to slink back towards us!

At first I just kind of treated him like a I would have a racoon, and tried to shoo him away and jangled my keys at him. He was completely unimpressed.  Buffy barked at him again but he continued toward us and it suddenly occurred to me that foxes bite thing and my sleep-addled brain remembered that I’m a big wuss. Buffy, the uber submissive dog who lays on her stomach and bows her head to a Chihuahua was still barking away, but I decided to be a wuss for both of us and pulled her inside.  Luckily she wasn’t bothered by not doing a number 2, and she went back to sleep. After I cleaned up her little bit of pee I got back in bed, but I have to say I was completely awake by that point…foxes!!!

Houdini, Buffy-style

So my puppy is Houdini, reincarnated.

This morning I shot up in bed, confused, when I heard something scratching at the door in the living room. I was completely confused to see that it was the puppy, awake, out of her crate, and trying to get out of the living room. Whhhuuu?  No one let her out – somehow, she managed to get out of her crate at some point between 11pm, when I put her in there, and 7:10 am, when she woke me up this morning. this is super confusing! The crate has a latch! It’s no fort knox, but surely a puppy should be incapable of opening such a latch, and from the inside…

Of course she’d managed to pull down all the paper and random bits of things we didn’t want her to have in the room (in fact, I feel like she multipled such items…surely there wasn’t that much crap in the room before she attacked it all!), so it looked a bit like a cyclone had hit the room while I slept (yes, it had. And that Cyclone’s name is Buffy).

And she’d peed on the carpet, though I don’t feel that one was her fault…she always desperately needs the loo in the morning, so I’m just happy she didn’t go in her crate.

But…what???? Still confused about the whole latch side of things…

In the (puppy) wars…

Well, Buffy of Sunnydale (and not my living room) was always a bit anti-establishment, and it seems her namesake is following in those footsteps…at not even five months old, Buffy (the puppy) seems to be starting her rebellious phase. I didn’t think that started til like 8 months!

Some things, I know, are my fault. There hasn’t been a great routine for Buffy over the last week, week and a half. My flatmates were working flat out for the election, so Buffy had a dog walker twice each afternoon, but she missed her other parents, and it wasn’t what she was used to. And then we had people over to stay this weekend, and I got lazy a couple of mornings over the last week and didn’t take her for her long morning walk…and last night, instead of taking her out when I noticed her sniffing around and making pee-type-motions, I tried to get her to stay with me on the couch, so as to encourage her to build up her ‘hold it’ time…but then she just escaped my hold and popped a squat on the carpet. I suppose upside was that she didn’t pee on the couch!

But whatever the reason, she’s been a mad thing, refusing to eat in her crate, tearing about the house, barking like mad when in her crate with us in the room…and generally causing us all to throw up our hands and pray for one of those magic remotes that mutes barking dogs.

Teenagers, eh?

Oh right, she’s like 3 years old in dog years. Maybe these are like toddler temper tantrums?

How do dog years work, anyway? I’ve never understood that.

Picspam!!!

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Buffy Recap!

Well! It’s been a long, long break! I didn’t mean to leave it this long but between work, the marketing campaign I’m running for my community choir, and all the time I had to spend talking about the UK elections, I’ve just been too busy! I thought today I’d do a bit of a recap of Buffy highlights.

-She’s gotten even cuter

-It is now even harder to leave for work or make her leave the bed

-She’s walking off leash now! This was a biggie for me, given the time I had to chase my parents’ Cavalier King Charles for about a half an hour when he broke his leash by running so fast after a flock of birds. Buffy is different though – she wants to stay near us, and when she goes off after birds or other dogs or small children (who she LOVES), she’s been very good at being called back. She comes right away about 9 times out of 10, which, while not, perfect, is ok for the moment because we only let her off the leash when well into the park so she won’t run towards any cars…and generally as she’s so adorable, no one minds if she runs up to them! Btu obviously we’re working on that.

-Have I mentioned she’s gotten even more adorable?

-She hates having her nails clipped now. She used to be ok, I’d just clip them while she was sleeping and it was fine…now it is a MISSION! She absolutely hates it, and we have tried every position we can think of to hold her while we do it, but BOY does she squirm. Currently we’re using the ‘hold onto her as long as possible and keep her head away from the clippers’ but that’s not our strongest dog training moment…any ideas?

-She’s had these weird stomach noises every once in a while lately. They sound like a combo of gas and hunger, but times about a thousand in terms of value. It’s a bit mad! She had it this morning but it went away after she ate…not sure if that means it was hunger? I need my pocket veterinarian again…

Right, well, that’s a quick summary! I’m definitely going to try to be better about writing from now on.

Canine-alogic

Buffy is a strange little puppy. I mean, I know her brain is the size of my big toe, but sometimes the workings in there mistify me completely. I just can’t figure out what’s going on behind her adorable little eyes. All the puppy books make it sound very simple – I wonder sometimes if this is their way of getting you to buy book after book. If it’s all so easy, one might think, then surely I should be able to understand it. Maybe the next book will do it. But as I’ve assuredly discovered, it’s not easy training or understanding a puppy, and even though I’m sure there’s a quite canine-alogical explanation for all her bahaviour, I can’t always figure it out. Specifically, I have no idea why she’s still peeing in her crate. For about a week, Buffy had stopped peeing in her crate when I came to let her out and take her out for a walk or play with her. Happily, I hummed to myself, thinking that the crate-peeing was just a stage, and that now that she was bigger and her bladder was stronger, she’s stopped all that nonsense. But I heard from my flatmates this weekend that Buffy had never stopped peeing for them – and I soon learned she hadn’t stopped peeing for me either. She’d taken a small break, was all. Now, when I come get her in the mornings, I lift off the towel covering her crate (from the very early rising british sun) and in between seeing me for the first time and me managing to get her crate open, Buffy stands up, then squats, then pees a bit…and then my hand snakes in and catches a bit of her pee and pulls her quickly out. The same sequence of events (minus the towel, which is only for nighttime) occurrs everytime I get her out of her crate now. No idea why. At all. What the heck??? Oh well we have obedience class this sunday so I’ll ask then!