We have lift off! Yesterday after her play time at the water, Maisy walked straight up to my truck as if she owned it, and when I opened the back door she jumped right in...no boost from me needed! How fantastic is THAT! The last few trips I've managed to bribe her to put her paws up onto the bed of the truck, and then I have hoisted her back end in for her...even getting those front paws up took a lot of patience and work. And even when I picked her up that morning, she shied from the truck a couple of times and needed some good ear scratches to reassure her that it was okay to get in...so jumping in all by herself was a huge step...I cannot wait for Wednesday to see if she will continue to be the confident dog I know she can be.
She has two Monday playmates she loves, and knows from outside of my dog pack. Chloe and Sabine. They are lowchen...the little lion dogs, not a dog you would usually mentally equate with a lab, but these two are very suited. Chloe is a lab in the water. She swims and retrieves as if she were meant to be a water dog. Of course she also has no undercoat to keep her warm so she comes out of the lake shivering. But just try to keep her away from the water, she lives to swim and that little tiny dog will DRAG me to the water if need be. Getting her out is a totally different story. I keep a long line on her so I stand some chance. Before the long line I had to wade in up to my waist a couple of times to get her...not my favorite thing to do in January. She truly will stay out and swim away long past the time when her body temperature becomes dangerous if I let her.
Her little sister, Sabine, is still a puppy, but what a puppy. She has not taken up her sister's swimming obsession, thank goodness. However, she stayed with us here when she was quite small, and apparently has never actually looked in a mirror. In her mind, she is my dog Mac...the big black lab. She is basically the size of my foot. Small, white, and bouncy. But at the park she is nose to nose with the big dogs all the time. She bounces up to them, plays chase and basically acts as if she is 75 lbs of dog. She even does some stalking...very sweet.
As you can imagine, the big dogs are quite curious about what that bunny looking thing is, but generally determine her to be dog quite quickly, and we don't have problems. Every once in a while one will decide rabbit, however, and try to roll her. Most of the time she handles this with aplomb. Yesterday, she made the mistake of letting out a yip...and an entire pack of dogs discovered the coolest squeak toy they'd ever seen, because it could run! She climbed some poor man like she was a cat, with the pack hot on her tail. She really was fine, and was right back down amongst the dogs as soon as possible so that she didn't develop any terrors. But hopefully she'll learn that the yip is not the answer.
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