Dalmatian excavates in the forest!

Walking with Lusi in the forest yesterday she starts to dig a hole:

Sunny conditions; there has been something of a thaw but the paths are still icy. The thaw has created ideal conditions for Lusi to savour the ground scents but she surprises me in her earnestness to excavate a hole. As her head starts to disappear in the hole I wonder if she has not come across a fox hole or some other wildlife habitat. 


Lusi's excavations end with her retiring from the hole with..... a big stick! I suppose if squirrels can hide nuts in a food stash...maybe dogs hide their sticks?


There's also a nice moment in the video when Lusi hears a train coming and she stops to listen! 


The liver-spotted coat of the Dalmatian is a perfect camouflage in the forest in winter!

HAND SIGNAL: GO TO THE SIDE DOOR!

Since the onset of the cold weather we try not to open the patio doors which lead from the kitchen to the deck so as to avoid that minus mid-twenty degree cold air blast. Still, Lusi will occasionally come to these doors and ask to be let in. I make a large U figure gesture to her through the glass doors, indicating that she should go to the side door entrance. Without a moment's hesitation off she trots at great speed and we arrive almost simultaneously but on opposite sides of the laundry room door.


I have become quite accustomed to how quickly Lusi catches onto things, so I didn't think much of this until my husband observed it and stood in amazement as Lusi, now seven months old, completed her circuit to the side door.


I think that I should start to make a list of all the verbal as well as the non-verbal hand signal commands that Lusi learns!


I believe that some dogs have quite a wide vocabulary of up to around 300 words. Some hearing impaired dogs have also been taught to communicate with their owners by sign language.

THE "DOG WALK": FUN AGILITY GAMES AT THE PARK

I was just going through some videos I'd taken just before the holidays and found this one....which seems very appropriate since we seem to be staying on the agility training theme!


When we are out walking together, I stop to coax and lure and then reward Lusi with a food reward for getting onto anything that has an unusual surface texture or is set at a height a bit above the ground level. As we pass by the remains of cut down trees we stop and Lusi clambers onto the remains of the trunk and tries to sit or sometimes attempts just to balance on it with all four feet. Stones, boulders, and fallen trees, are all equally good in providing different textures and elements of difficulty.

In a recent walk to a new park I was giving Lusi a fairly free long line to roam the grounds when she headed for what must have looked like the ideal agility course. Her inspection of the first piece was followed by her traversing the second piece; this comprised a long low ramp leading to a long extended low horizontal walk and then down another ramp at the far end. Yes, it looked pretty close to a "dog walk" to me too!

Now it is possible that she was following a scent up onto the "dog walk"...or maybe she chose to try the equipment out and just happened to pick up the scent which she then followed. In either case there was a definite desire, both to get on and to stay on the wooden walk. I had not indicated in any way that she should even approach the walk so it was quite surprising to find that she stayed the course almost to the very end! What a clever girl!


It looks as though we are beginning "to shape behaviour" when it comes to trying out agility equipment.

LUSI GOOSEY'S AGILITY TRAINING PAYS OFF!

You will remember that one of our favourite walks is along the river: Recently I made a video about how the little wooden bridge across the creek had been washed away and how Lusi had run up and down trying to find a way across the creek for both of us. On that and several subsequent walks we have not been able to cross the creek. This all changed yesterday when my husband took Lusi out for a walk!

When Lusi arrived at the creek with my husband from the opposite direction via the field with the hay rolls and before that the road that crosses the river at the main bridge. My husband thinking that there was an alternate route across the creek that didn't require scaling the broken wooden bridge was surprised to discover his error. The choice was quite clear: Either he must cross the creek with Lusi or return home from the direction he had come.

If you have seen the video you can appreciate the angle of the wooden bridge lying sideways in the creek! And now it was covered in snow and ice making it a less than trustworthy crossing. 

" At first I was just following the foot prints in the snow.... (not thinking that they were headed for the broken bridge), so when we arrived it was a bit of a surprise!" my husband admits. 

"I crossed on the beam next to the bridge by grabbing the thin branch. Then when I turned around I saw that Lusi was still standing on the opposite bank, apparently stuck in her efforts to cross. So I went back across the ice covered beam and scrabbled up the bank to her."

I interject here to provide evidence of this difficult crossing with photos taken from today's walk so that I could better illustrate this story....little did I know that that would create a whole new story all of its own!)

"Once I arrived on the opposite bank from whence I had come," my husband continues to recount the story, "I had to try and persuade Lusi to cross with me. After trying to get her to cross on the beam which she steadfastly declined to do, she did gradually follow my beckoning towards the sloping boards of the bridge. The angle at which the bank and the broken bridge meet meant that it was difficult to get a purchase on the slope and you slid down the bank into the bridge, if you were not quick or brave enough to leap onto it at the last moment."

"Once on the bridge you had to prevent yourself from continuing to slip downwards on the boards. It required a few horizontal steps before you could finally reach for the branch in a last ditch attempt to avoid the water in the creek and then get enough of a grasp to haul yourself up onto the other side of the bank. Lusi of course had to leap from the boards up to the opposite bank! And finally this is indeed what she did."

This might have provided enough excitement for the day, but there was one last bit of the story still......

"As Lusi ran ahead of me now on the pathway towards the river, she inadvertently disturbed a large group of Mallards resting quietly. Her sudden appearance was greeted with such a kerfuffle of wing beating as the entire group of ducks went up in the air that it made for an "Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud" encounter, whereupon Lusi herself then leapt up into the air with fright from the thunderous noise!

And there is an addendum to this entire story, as I mentioned earlier!  When I went out today to take some photos to illustrate what happened at the bridge today... Yes, you guessed already...Lusi did indeed replay this adventure once more but from the opposing direction. The only difference was that Lusi having already made the crossing once with John now proceeded to do it all on her own. Once again Lusi and her owner faced one another from opposite banks of the creek! Today however, I could not make it across on the icy surfaces and had to lure Lusi back to me!

LUSI GOOSEY BURIES THE GLOVE!

YES, THE GLOVE IS VERY SPECIAL! This was clearly what Lusi was thinking when we were out a few minutes ago on our walk.


I had borrowed a pair of soft gloves from my husband just as I was leaving the house so as to avoid having to take my boots off again in search of my own. After we had been walking for about half an hour during which time I had made only a few rather undemanding requests of Lusi, she returned to me in a rather spectacular recall! I was so delighted that I immediately played tug with her with one of the gloves as a reward. This action was shortly followed by her taking off with the glove.


As Lusi headed for an area of undergrowth and brush at the edge of the woods, I thought that I had been silly to use the glove in a non tracking related situation and wondered what consequences this might have for our training. Well, what was done was done I thought, (it's all too easy with animals to undo the training that you have put in.) And so I followed Lusi to retrieve the glove from the thicket only to find her busily burying it. I was so amused at this point to see the care that she was taking to cover it first in pine needles and then in larger pieces of twigs and brush that I hung back to watch the proceedings.


Only when Lusi had finished and was actually turning towards me did I step forward to the spot where she had been burying the glove. What astonished me now was had I not seen precisely where she had buried the item, I would not have known where to look, such was the cleverness of her disguise in the cover.  And so, throwing off the remaining glove from the other hand I carefully removed the layers rather like the BBC Time Team in an archeological dig and finally came up trumps with the glove undamaged save for a little blackening from the soil.


Lusi eyed me, I thought a little suspiciously, or perhaps it was only with some curiosity; that I should undo her work so immediately after her accomplishment seemed even to me rather unfair now. Perhaps I should have just left the glove buried since it was clearly "very special", signalling that our recent tracking training and Lusi's "article indication" has certainly conveyed some level of significance to the clothing. The only other items I have seen Lusi attempt to bury are her favourite bones and just once a toy that she was hiding from the Chihuahuas


Of course, as in all the most amusing incidents, one is never carrying a camera! Note to self...never, never, leave home without the camera!

IT"S EASY TO LOSE A LUSI GOOSEY IN THE SNOW!

What a difference a few days makes! On Monday we had lovely sunshine reminiscent of the late days in fall but on our walk today it has been snowing. There is already enough snow to cover the branches and were it not for Lusi's coat, it would be quite difficult to see her against the landscape such as it is. I should probably have bought her a bright red coat and not a green one as it only seems to have added to her ability to be completely camouflaged when she is under the fir trees!

    

We made our way through the trees and brush to avoid being on the river bank; the water level was so high from two days of rains that it had flooded over the bank in some parts and I was concerned that Lusi might try to investigate the newly created river bank if we walked too close to the river. In fact the current was so strong and the water flowing so fast that it might easily carry an unsuspecting pup down-stream. I need not have worried so much though because Lusi was in fact happy to play in the snow and then she played "recall" from the bushes which we both enjoyed.

LUSI GOOSEY'S WALK BY THE RIVER

 Lusi loves to go for walks down by the river. Even when she was a small  pup at ten weeks old she liked to lie in the long cool grass after surfing through it at high speed. Now she is a lot bigger and stronger she will leap from one spot to another whenever there is a small hillock. She will create her own course in the grass and run it several times in rapid succession. If she hears a noise  like the train approaching she will jump into the air for a better view. She did the same high jumping when I threw her a frisbee to retrieve from the long grass. As the frisbee has a particularly unpredictable landing spot Lusi quickly deduced that she could get a much better idea of its landing location by jumping to see where the frisbee was coming down.

Lusi surveys the landscape from her vantage point

Since we have been going to puppy agility classes we take every opportunity to find unusual surfaces to walk or climb onto while we are out on our walks. Lusi will now "look" for boulders and tree stumps to climb onto. The tree trunk was a little trickier at first but she soon got used to the texture of the bark and the curved and narrowing dimensions of the trunk where it divides into two branches at one end. We decided that this photo looked like a painting by the nineteenth century English painter, George STUBBS.