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!

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.

WHO IS LUSI GOOSEY?

Lusi is our 5 month old liver spotted Dalmatian. We call her "Lusi goosey" whenever she does something that makes us laugh...which is a lot. This is something of a surprise to us since we have owned dogs all our lives; first German Shorthaired Pointers and then Chihuahuas, not to mention my daughter's lovely Lab-Shepherd cross which came to live with us for several years.

As a child I had always wanted to have a dog and perhaps that is why we now have four dogs living with us: two older Chihuahuas, Loki and Cola, one youngster, Remy, and our latest addition to the family, Lusi Goosey the Dalmatian.

The comment that I am most often met with when I meet someone is, "Oh! A Dalmatian... you hardly ever see Dalmatians anymore!" It seems that everyone is in love with the breed and yet our idea of what a Dalmatian is has almost exclusively been moulded by Disney studios. I suspect that the rise in popularity of the Dalmatian breed with the movie "101 Dalmatians" was just as quickly followed by the decline in the numbers of the breed as people sadly discovered that this beautiful dog could not be as easily accommodated in the family as they had anticipated judging from the movie and their possible previous experience with other breeds that are happy to lead a normal family life! 

Featured in breed books as a high energy dog it is difficult to describe that level of energy except perhaps in terms of hours walking per day!

As an eight week old puppy, I was surprised at how big Lusi had already grown as we arrived to collect her! Even more surprising to me was just how fast she grew in the coming weeks. She is now five months old and weighs around forty pounds with at least another fifteen to go. Despite her growth, Lusi is very much a puppy still. Her brain is yet to develop about half as much again; in fact Lusi really is just a "half-brained" dog! This definitely partly explains why Lusi is "goosey", but I am beginning to suspect that Dalmatians rather enjoy being goosey; it seems to be part of their personality.