Skinned

Steve and I blame Tucker for the bald patch on Darby's nose. We'd taken both dogs with us to Julian, where we spent Friday and Saturday at the home of some close (and dog-tolerant) friends. Because their large property is unfenced, we'd been careful about keeping the dogs either inside, or on the enclosed deck, or under close observation. At bedtime, we put both of them in a the large cloth kennel we'd brought with us. That's where they were at 3 a.m. when one of them started whining.

Thinking that maybe Darby had been thrown off by the new surroundings, Steve stumbled in the dark to find his shoes and coat. He unzipped the kennel; hustled both dogs out the front door. They peed for a few seconds. Then they ran off into the black frosty night.

I, in the meantime, was lying in bed, wondering why the bathroom break was taking an eternity. Curiosity finally drove me out the front door too, where Steve announced that they had run away. I freaked out.

He went back into the inky house in the delusional hope of finding some flashlight, while I stood shivering in my pajamas on the porch. "Tucker!" I called, trying to keep the volume soft enough to avoid waking up everyone sleeping within earshot but loud enough to reach the racing canines. I clapped my hands. I heard nothing.

I kept clapping and calling, and after what seemed like an eternity, I heard a distant tinkling of dog tags. Eventually, they bounded into sight, tongues lolling, tails a blur.

They went right to sleep, but it took us a long, long time to drift off. Incredibly, they ran away again in the morning, when Steve took them out to toilet. This time he searched for them in the bright sunshine, and Darby came racing back alone. Tucker showed up several minutes later, his collar firmly in the grasp of the sheriff's deputy who lived in the distant house across the way.

That's why we think he was the ringleader. As meek and deferential as he is at home, he longs to be the Wild Dog of the Forest. Given a forest, he bolts. Darby merely followed. And somewhere on the romp, she skinned all the fur off a fingernail-sized patch not far from her right eye.

He may look sleepy most of the time, but the Wild Dog of the Forest lives within.

Was it a run-in with cat or raccoon? Too close a brush with some immovable object? We shudder to think. But she'll never tell.

Shame

As a puppy-raiser, I'm asked all the time how I can bear to turn in one of the dogs I've raised. I often explain that for me the experience is a little childbirth. While the turn-in days are horrible, as soon as they're over, I forget how devastated I felt. Similarly, once a puppy stops doing bad things, I tend to forget he or she ever did them. That was a big reason why I started this blog: I wanted to be able to store such details in a permanent record.

The only problem, I've discovered, is that once a puppy is more than a few months old, it can feel shameful to reveal the bad stuff. You want all your puppies to graduate and forever change lives for the better. If they keep making the most basic mistakes, you begin to fear the worst: that they just don't have the right stuff.

For that reason, I hate to say it, but yesterday morning Darby once again squatted on our Oriental carpet and peed a rather substantial amount of pee. She did the same thing in mid-December (and had NOT done it anywhere in the house for months and months before that.) But now she's more than 13 months old, "and still not housebroken," Steve noted mournfully. What's more basic than housebreaking?

We speculate that maybe she was just excited. I had just walked in after being out for several hours and was tossing the ball for her. (Still, seven-year-old Tucker never ever has such lapses.) Whatever the cause, we can only hope one day after she graduates, we'll look back at this post and take comfort. It will remind us that even the best dogs, even the stars, can have a bad moment when they're puppies.

Still Waiting

Miss Darby turned 13 months old on Saturday... and she STILL hasn't had her first heat. Her girl parts look a tad swollen, but that's the only clue any physiological changes might be occurring.

 

We've been a little puzzled and we communicated that to Rick Spicer, who along with his wife Irina, raised Darby's mother. They're now her breeder/ caretakers.  Rick did some research and reported back that Darby's eldest sister Dreya "had her heat cycle in mid-January." Second-born Dovela had hers in late December, while Dazzle (#3) and Darby (#5) are still "awaiting their passage into womanhood."

Rick also compared notes with another puppy raiser who has raised a female sired by Paxton (Darby's dad), and "in our discussing other female Paxton pups that we know of, apparently most of Paxton's girls have a tendancy to run a little later with their first heat cycles than 'average.'"

Who knew?  (I guess we do now!)

  

Christmas cheer

Another nice things about puppies: they don't find men in red suits with giant white things covering the bottom of their faces to be terrifying.  So many little kids do.

Here's Darby and Santa (one of the many cute scenes at the recent Christmas party at CCI's Oceanside headquarters). But SHE would snuggle up next to anyone!

What WAS she thinking...

...when she peed in the middle of the living room this morning?  I didn't catch her in the act, only the unmistakably hued puddle. But it had to have been Darby. Tucker would no sooner pee in the living room than he would catch and eat a baby.  Can it be that she simply forgot to pee on the walk that we had concluded only 5 minutes before?  That she forgot to check the back door for egress?  (It was open.) She's eleven and a half months old and hasn't had this kind of accident in months.

Surely, the ways of puppies are inscrutable.  (Mercifully, the pee was on the wood floor, and not the rug...)

Christmas Drill

The big news about this La Jolla Christmas Parade was not that it was charming.  It usually is, and the sunny skies and warm afternoon drew a big crowd, which made the whole event even more festive. No, it was that the CCI Puppy Drill Team looked far sharper and more disciplined than it did at the Coronado Fourth of July Parade. Darby didn't have much of a clue as to what was going on. But if she had, she would have been proud.

I credit Pattie Urie, the team founder and brains of our operation. It was Pattie who organized extra practice sessions throughout the fall, and she who found the snowflake "crowns" worn by the pups this year and their sparkly blue capes. She also alerted the pup handlers to white scarves available from Walmart that definitely made us look more professional.  It paid off.  Our lines were more or less crisp. We moved more or less in unison. The crowd oohed.

Darby, on the other hand, seemed to take it all with a grain of salt. There's always a long wait before our group gets to line up and march, which must feel agonizing if you're young and furry and fired with desire to do nothing more than play with all the other pups assembled. But Darby patiently endured the wait until we got to stand.

Marching down Girard Street, she seemed exceptionally well-behaved to me (though perhaps the drums and bagpipes and Clydesdales had put a dent in her normal exuberance.) One thing for sure: she stood out, being the only black pup among the drillers.

Another thing for sure: if Darby didn't think the drill team was the most fun she'd ever had, Tucker looked happy enough for the two of them. He didn't drill, being long ago released from puppy servitude. He just trotted along in the team's wake and wagged his tail and smiled and smiled.

Murderess

Considering how many puppies we've had, it's somewhat surprising that we haven't had any huge Christmas tree disasters ( i.e. one in which the puppy brought the entire gigantic tree crashing down.) Most of the dogs have been very good.  But Darby's making us more nervous. Already she has murdered one of my oldest ornaments, part of a set of Japanese paper figures that I brought back from my very first trip to Japan, in 1979. Here you see the attack, before...

 and after.

She also has liberated several other adornments from the tree but without destroying them.  We're trying to fight back with much closer supervision.