Author: bryan

I figure I’ve left the profane Obama ad up at the top long enough, so a quick update on life and puppyness: Yesterday was our first day with Sous’s pen taken down, and overall it went great. Leslie is mixing up frozen kongs for her every morning now, so she quite happily munched on breakfast in her crate for an hour and a half while we ate breakfast and prepared for the day. Walking on loose leash is really getting good now that we have started using a Gentle Leader head collar. It really only goes into action once or twice per walk, or if she feels like lunging at another dog or friendly person to greet them. Whenever she spontaneously decides to fall into a heel, we give her pieces of kibble, so she tends to naturally hang out there a lot of the time.
I’ve just finished reading Jean Donaldson’s Culture Clash, which is basically a rant against traditional dog training and a plea and explanation for more humane and realistic training and behavior modification. Even after reading Ian Dunbar’s Before and After Getting Your Puppy, which gives you basically the same philosophy in a more practical package but without explaining “why?”, I was very impressed by her viewpoint. There is so much magical thinking that goes on with dog training, and the more I banish it, the more success I feel like I have. Her book inspired us to tackle a few of the remaining nagging behaviors that we’ve been ignoring. For example, Sous pretty much hates grooming and gets very squirmy when we brush her. We’d half-heartedly tried to fix it by feeding her treats during the process, but our consistency wasn’t great. Yesterday we tried giving her one brush stroke, then giving her a piece of kibble, then another stroke, then another piece. Sure enough, by the hundredth stroke or so, she was happily standing there collecting food while she got brushed. This process counter-conditions grooming to be something she likes, and you are supposed to slowly ramp down the rate she gets food until she stands for a whole grooming session for one treat at the end. We’ll see.

On the more fun side of things, we’re in the process of training her to turn on our DVD player (which can’t be done with a remote control). We used the clicker and have managed to pretty reliably get her to go turn it on and off from a foot or two away with her nose. The next step is adding more distance so that she’ll eventually jump off the couch and do it. At that point I’ll be sure to post a video 🙂

Look! Sous can imitate internet memes:

It looks like Sous has reached an age where she is developing some self control. Not only can she occasionally do reliable stays while I stand around the corner, she now knows “leave it,” which basically means “don’t touch that thing you really want that’s right in front of you.” The corollary of course is “take it,” which is really her favorite part. For some reason tricks where she doesn’t do something are more impressive to me than ones where she does.

Even more exciting was our first trip on Sunday to the off-leash dog park at the Berkeley marina. Although the park is on a peninsula, it’s big (about 30 acres), and the off-leash area doesn’t actually extend to the edges of the peninsula. So there’s this little 17-acre circle in the middle where dogs are allowed off leash. I had kind of pictured a fence around it, but no such luck–just stakes with “leaving off leash area” written on them here and there.

Every previous dog of mine has had totally reliable behavior when you took off the leash, and that behavior is to rocket away from you as fast as possible. The next step was usually the “keep at least 100 yards away from Bryan” game, but it was also sometimes the “disappear for hours until you hop into a stranger’s pick-up” game. People walking around with their dogs dutifully following off lead has always seemed kind of like a fantasy magic world to me.

So, it was with considerable trepidation that we unhooked Sous’s leash. She immediately trotted directly away from us about 20 feet, and my heart sank. She bounded through some tall grass, scaring off birds as we sheepishly followed, and then something amazing happened. She looked back at us. I crouched down and did my most convincing “Sous, come!”, and she starts rocketing toward me with this huge puppy smile. I couldn’t believe it. We got a repeat performance a couple of minutes later, and then realized that we could walk along and she would stay generally with us, never letting us get more than 20 or 30 feet away. She would greet other dogs politely, maybe play a little if they were down, but we could always get her back to us, and in the absence of other dogs she stayed pretty close. I was on cloud nine… this was always part of my dog dream, but I didn’t think I was going to start living it at 4 months!

George and Jana joined us for the rest of the afternoon and we just strolled around, meeting interesting dogs and people, including a 120-lb old lady with her 145-lb Rhodesian ridgeback–quite a pair! I think we’ve got a picture that we’ll try to post soon, but I think you could have stuffed Sous into a jar smaller than this dog’s head.

So anyway… Sous is now officially the best-trained dog I’ve ever had. She’s spending 3 hours alone in her crate each afternoon while I’m at the office, she’s up to 10 days without a housebreaking accident (knock on wood), and acts more and more like a real dog any day. It’s almost like they give you a puppy at 8 instead of 16 weeks just to see if you’re serious.

Last week I got a pedometer to put in the bag that we take everywhere with Sous. It counts the number of steps we take, and so it can tell us what our total walking distance is. The total for the first week we had it: 25.51 miles. No wonder I don’t get so winded going up the hill to Soda anymore.

We always claimed that getting outside for consistent twice-daily exercise was one of our goals for dog ownership. At first, staring down another hour outside at 6:30 in the morning was nigh unbearable, but now by the time we get through the first block or so (especially on sunny days), I find my mood soaring. Probably the blood flow knocking loose some endorphins in my brain. Anyway, the alternative would just be staring at websites for another pointless hour in front of a monitor.

Unlike the world-shattering cataclysm that is taking in an 8-week-old puppy, the process of getting your life back as the puppy ages is the definition of gradual. Things from the last week that would have seemed impossible to the Bryan of January 19th:

• An evening spent in the south bay playing video games and drinking beer (thank you, Les).
• A 2.5-hour absence from the Great Sous Monster to go to a meeting and do some work at the lab.
• A trip with Sous to the lab to meet the graphics group.
• A relaxing hour at our computers with Sous quietly chewing some unspeakably literal dried cow anatomy.
• A day spent cleaning the apartment.
• A ‘down’ from 15 feet away with no hand signal.
• Reasonable confidence that when I put Sous down at 10:30pm she will let us sleep until 6am. Holy shit, this is the greatest thing ever.

These small victories have gone a long way toward repairing my psyche. Maybe its because the memory of my pre-dog life is fading, but I feel almost kinda sorta normal about facing a 45-minute walk at 6:30 every morning. And by the time 7pm rolls around, Sous is downright fun to be with. We started learning tricks (I taught her “shake” for Leslie’s birthday; she’s working on “roll over” now).

We’ve even started in on the new-age hippy clicker training that is all rage. I read a lot about it before taking the plunge. It seems unnecessary for a companion dog that you just want to well-mannered. But Sous has a big future of fetching beer for me, and as far as I can tell, clicker training is the way 90% of service animals and competitive obedience animals are trained. In my “beginner” clicker book there are instructions for teaching your dog to close cabinet doors, put errant dirty clothes in the laundry basket, and turn out lights. Think about it, man.

In the time I don’t spend molding my protégé, I’ve been working on a contract for a video game company that is doing a pretty good job of distracting me from my thesis. So I’m pushing hard to get that done so I can go back to my final sprint. Also, there’s this job search to do. It’s all seeming very possible these days.

Last night, Sous slept almost SEVEN HOURS between outside trips. Then she went promptly back to sleep until 7am. I feel almost like a normal person this morning.

I’ll just refer you to Les’s blog to see some nice, detailed posts about our new charge. She’s put things coherently and that’s something I’m probably not capable of at the moment. I’ve been run down, but I think I’m on the road to recovery. Tonight is my night to sleep instead of worrying about trips outside, which will make it my first good night of sleep since last Friday—what bliss. What a project we’ve undertaken. Here’s a picture that Clare took when she came over to offer moral support on night 3 that helps me take the whole thing less seriously: