Thursday January 27, 2005 Doggie Update
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Yesterday, my wife took our dog Dusti along to the local Petco for a trim and to have her toenails clipped. They threw in a tooth cleaning as well. It seems that the stylist went a tad to far. It's the doggie equivalent of a buzz cut. Lynea managed to stop them in time, before the face and tail ended up the same way. It'll look like we had a large rat otherwise.
We should think of a new name for the dog now. Shaun instantly came to mind after the sheep in the Wallace and Gromit adventure. Duncan wants to call her Woody because her coat not looks like the grain of a newly sanded plank of wood.
Before this clipping I was worry that she might have been over-weight. I can clearly see that this is not the case. Poor little thing is not quite used to the lack of her second coat at the moment. Last night she was wedged tightly between us on the bed trying desperately to get extra body warmth. She is nicely streamlined now which will help her with her cat chasing.
Which brings me onto the second part. Dusti is a Norwich terrier (mostly). It's been breed into her to chase small animals. Cat's are included. No matter what we'd tried, she will chase our two cats, Bob and Sorcha. It''s a playful chase, but the cats don't understand that. We are unable to stop her doing this.
The cats live upstairs most of the time and don't venture down when the dog is around. That unfortunately isn't perfect as she'll quite happily venture up and continually bark at them as they huddle under the bed, hissing back at her. We needed to fix this. Or at least reduce the cats stress level if we could.
I remembered that we still had a couple baby gates in the garage, so I bought one in and suggested to Lynea that she try putting that across the top of the staircase the next day. Now I really meant for her to take it out of the box, and properly install it, but she had a better idea. Strangely enough, it seems to be working. Dusti runs up the stairs and just stops in front of it. Doesn't try to jump over it and doesn't try to just knock it down. Gives out a plaintive moan and comes back down. When the cats want to come downstairs, the cats will happily just jump over the box.
I want to believe that this dog will get a clue soon, but in that case, we'll simply take the baby gate out of the box and put it up.
( Jan 27 2005, 11:04:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink
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