Tag: labradors

Happy Birthday Charlie

Charlie turns seven on Halloween. His date of birth sort of says it all when you describe him. He is the sweetest most lovable psycho dog anyone would ever want to own. One minute he’s sitting beside you looking up at you with the softest expression then a split second later his face changes and no one is sure who’s inside there looking out. It’s pretty unsettling to anyone who comes over.

 Charlie is animal aggressive thanks to a dog attacking him as a puppy owned by a woman that lives around here once in our yard and another time on an encounter while walking him. That pretty much set the tone for all other dogs in Charlie’s mind. We have to be very vigilant around other dogs. It has taken months of hard work to get him to play with our friends’ two dogs. When their two dogs and our three get together, we are all on guard for any change in the force.

We have our first pheasant hunting trip coming up shortly and now that he’ll be seven, we’re hoping that some of his exuberance at being out in the field doing what all of his instincts are screaming his brain to do (better known as running around in the field totally out of control, flushing birds a mile away) will be diminished. Not likely! But we’re holding on to hope. What can I say, I am a Pollyanna.

This year we’re going hunting with middle aged to senior citizen dogs. AJ is eleven, Charlie will be seven and Orso (non-hunting Lab) is five. Mitch is still optimistic about Orso. I don’t hold out much hope though. Maybe we’ll get to work the fields at a more sedate speed instead of the 4mph walks I’ve done in the past.

A Bored Dog Wears Me Out!

Dogs do all kinds of things when they’re bored.  They can be terribly destructive, chew on furniture, shoes and tear up stuff.  Dogs will start snooping around, checking out something that smells interesting then go after it with a vengeance.  Where some people eat when bored, Orso drinks when he’s bored.  He finds the one pastime that he really likes.  Orso drinks water.  Not just come into the kitchen and drink water when he’s thirsty. Oh no.  Orso will stand and lap at the water in one of the water buckets in the kitchen, not really drinking, but sort of flicking his tongue into the water, just killing time waiting for something to fall off of the countertop.  He tries to be so nonchalant about it.  If we’re not paying attention to him, he will stand there for five or ten minutes playing in the water.  The next thing we notice is that he has drained the bucket.  That dog has drunk a gallon of water just being bored killing time. 

It doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, drinking too much water.  It’s not fattening, calorie free and keeps your skin hydrated, all silky and smooth.  Sounds great, until 12:45 in the middle of the night, when a giant dog head starts banging the side of the bed to wake you up because his bladder is about to explode.  Whenever any of the dogs gets up in the middle of the night, they only come to my side of the bed.  Mitch always gets to stay in Z land mainly because someone could drive a car through the house and he’d sleep through it.  Not me, I’m a light sleeper so whenever anything stirs I’m awake.  Raising two boys and staying one step ahead them creates light sleepers and it just stuck, even after they grew up, moved out and started their own families.

So at 12:43 to be exact, Orso started banging his head on my side of the bed.  I turned on the light and tried to coax him onto the foot of the bed and go back to sleep, but he was having none of that.  He had to go out RIGHT NOW!  I dragged myself out of bed and of course the other two got up also, because when mom gets up, we all get up.  Mitch can get up go to the bathroom or wander around the house, nobody else stirs, lucky me. I took them outside and Orso stood out there and peed in one spot for 8 minutes, I know because I timed him. 

Now we have something new to watch out for, because I do not like getting up in the middle of the night for anything or anybody, especially not a dog.

They’re Just Like Kids

I had to do the “hidden objects in the mouth” check again this morning after our walk.  This year has produced a bumper crop of large acorns.  These giant acorns are the ones with the fuzzy caps still attached when they drop off the trees.  It sounds like a hail storm when the acorns start falling down.  As big as they are, the acorns gain velocity the farther they have to drop before hitting an unsuspecting object below.  I had a car that looked like it had been through a really bad hail storm after being pummeled from falling acorns.  Anyway I digress.

All of the dogs love these large acorns and will stop dead in their tracks on our walks to crack and eat them.  Orso only likes the fuzzy cap, (go figure) and after chewing off the cap will drop the acorn to the ground, which Charlie or AJ will then snatch up and crack with their jaws, eat the nut meat and spit out the shells.  On our morning walks, I don’t have the luxury of standing around shelling acorns for the dogs.  Mornings I’m on a schedule and acorn shelling is not on it.  As the dogs try to stop and eat acorns, I have to yank on the leash or leashes of the offending dogs to drag them along.  I constantly remind them that this walk is not a brunch walk, but a business walk and they need to get to it, just like kids. 

So now all of them are getting cagey.  They will walk along, dip their heads down and snatch up acorns without missing a step.  Yesterday, I noticed that Charlie was walking rather sedately, staying close to me and not wandering around sniffing and peeing on everything.  He would turn his head to glance up at me then turn back quickly so I couldn’t really see his mouth.  I stopped and bent down to get a closer look, and sure enough there was a large acorn hanging out of his mouth.  I let him take it home but made him spit it out before going inside; I wanted to avoid the truly unpleasant sensation of stepping barefoot on broken acorn shells left as a mine field on the dark brown rug.

This morning, both Charlie and Orso had hidden acorns in their mouths to savor later this morning after I left for work.  As I did the “Drop it!” command, I heard multiple acorns hitting the steps.  Charlie being the smaller of the two only had hidden one, but Orso, having the jowls of a Mastiff, had squirreled away FOUR in his mouth. 

Dogs are so much like children, and I had thought that now I could relax and enjoy life with both sons grown, married and with children of their own.  But no, now I have to revert to my parenting days when I raised my sons and had to stay three steps ahead of each of them, just to maintain my sanity.

My Three Dogs

We have three dogs.  AJ, The Good Dog, Charlie, The Green-Eyed Monster, and Orso, The Drool Machine.  AJ, The Good Dog, a seventy pound Labrador, is sweet and loving, soft and gentle and totally devoted to me.  Most of the time he has a serious expression on his face, but when the mood strikes him, The Good Dog is full of the Devil.  I’ve seen him put Olympic style wrestling moves on a ninety five pound Doberman and take him to the ground, laying on top of Rocky just chewing on his neck.  Now at eleven years old, the moments of the Devil are fewer and farther between, but it’s still there when needed. 

We got Charlie, The Green-Eyed Monster, when he was ten weeks old.  AJ acted like a proud papa watching over him and playing with him as Charlie grew up.  It was pretty amazing watching AJ play to Charlie’s level, never too hard, only as hard as the puppy could handle.  As Charlie grew the play got rougher, teaching him how to handle himself.  Charlie is a sixty five pound half German Shorthair half Labrador and total psycho dog.  Even though he  was almost raised by AJ, he will get extremely jealous of the attention we give AJ or Orso.  At seven years old, he will still look at you with an expression that says, “I’m the baby!  Don’t play with him, touch me.”

I didn’t want Orso, The Drool Machine, didn’t want to even go look at him.  A coworker of Mitch’s has a son that had a nine month old Chocolate Lab who needed to get rid of him.  I kept telling Mitch two dogs was enough.  The was no tension, both dogs got along, nothing was getting destroyed, life was good.  But Mitch said, “Let’s just go take a look see.  We don’t have to bring him home.”  What a crock.  Mitch knows me well enough to know that if I see him, we’ll be bringing him home.  So long story short, we came home with a ninety five pound puppy.  At five years old, The Drool Machine has wormed his way into our hearts, so he is here to stay.

Fast and Deadly Charlie

Charlie once again proved that he is a fast and deadly hunter.  I’m not sure how I feel about it.  I let the three dogs out to do their business and Charlie shot up the steps, and disappeared behind the car before I could run up the steps behind him.  As I walked to the back of the car I heard a squeal and found Charlie flinging a squirrel to the ground.  Evidently he had run it down before the squirrel could get to the safety of a tree.  I called him off the wounded squirrel before he and the other dogs could finish it off.  The squirrel laid on the ground panting heavily for a few moments before getting up and scrambled to the closest tree, barely escaping death. 

I took the dogs back inside and checked Charlie for any wounds from the squirrel and found a couple of places below his right eye that looked like the squirrel had scratched him trying to get away.  I cleaned the scratches up and put ointment on them.  He looked up at me with a quizzical look of his face.  He wanted me to proud of him for his quickness and precision at snagging his prey and a part of me was.  I’m proud that he is fast and doesn’t have any hesitation when going after prey.  When we’re pheasant hunting it’s important that the dog is willing and without any hesitation, rushes into brush, tall grasses and plum thickets to flush and retrieve birds.  But at the same time I was appalled that he ran the squirrel down, grabbed it, flung it to the ground and if I hadn’t stopped him, he would have gone back in for the kill. 

Does that make me a hypocrite, it’s okay for us to hunt and shoot pheasants (we do eat them), but not let the dogs do what comes naturally to them?  It’s not like squirrels are on the endangered species list, and are terribly destructive, but somehow my sense of fair play was bothered by it all.  I felt bad for the squirrel and at the same time was proud that Charlie had once again proven that he will be an asset when we go pheasant hunting this fall.

My Burr-Fect Dogs

All three covered in stick tights, happy and tired after a three mile hike.

Charlie always on the hunt.

 

Orso, watching the others and waiting.

Ah, The Quiet of the Early Morning, Not!

Where is a large bird of prey when you need it?  We’re on vacation this week, which means we get to sleep in past our normal 2:45 am wake up call.  Sounds wonderful, but only in theory.  In reality we have a neighbor that owns two very obnoxious “squeaky toys” with four legs.  They were up and at it barking their heads off at 4:15 this morning.  I know because I looked at the clock.  I laid there for a few minutes thinking all sorts of evil thoughts of different ways of their demise.  Of course, I could never actually follow through with any of my mental wanderings, because ultimately it’s not the dogs fault.  The blame rests squarely on the owner’s shoulders.

Maybe he was lonely, I don’t know, but getting a dog requires a lot more than just being a cure for loneliness.  You have to interact with them, a lot.  There’s training, training and more training. Affection and lots of exercise.  We have labs, and labs have a ton of energy and if left to their own devices, can get very hyper and destructive, mostly from boredom.  Everyone that comes to our home always comments on how laid back they are.  Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have giant rugs here, these guys can destroy a room in no time (and have) if we would let them.  Our neighbor even built a doggie door for them so that he didn’t have to get up to let them out.  Which means now he has even less interaction with them.  He fenced off a tiny little area in his yard for them to run around in. Maybe a six square foot area.  He fenced it off with a garden fence, something my dogs wouldn’t even notice as they walked through.  So now these two loud obnoxious animals rush outside at all hours and bark incessantly. Amazing how something so small can be so loud.  It is beginning to grate on my last nerve.  Even my dogs are tired of their irritating rants.  On our walk yesterday, Charlie turned and started to charge at the dogs with hair raised down his back.  I was almost tempted but I was sure there might have been witnesses.

I’ve even tried to make up to them with no success.  No I really don’t want to see the dogs dead, just quiet.

Games dogs play

Cooler weather means more wrestling

 

 A great game of keep away