Where does the time go? Just a few short months ago I was driving to South Dakota to pick up Tucker. Fast forward to today, Tucker is 6 months old and looking more like an adult yellow lab than the puppy I met in March.
Like kids, dogs progress quickly. Hard to remember when they were little. Tucker now weighs in at 55 lbs. and while he appears to be on the more adult dog side of things he is still all puppy. His speed and agility have ratcheted up ten-fold which when outside is great but when inside the house or office can cause problems. Safe to say now we have moved on to the second level of dog proofing the home and have added an electronic collar into the mix (thank you DT Systems).
So what have we accomplished at this point? We have “sit, stay, come” in good. This is reinforced when he has his collar on. He really snaps too and has learned basically on vibrate mode. For whatever reason “down” is not locked in but is one of our big focuses right now and we are probably 75% of the way there. Tucker is very sensitive to any electrical stimulation, so I use that sparingly. He is healing pretty well and will get deeper into that as we progress. We are working on lining for short distances and retrieves back to the hand. Still keeping this one fun and light. DT Systems sent a dummy launcher which we will soon incorporate as well. I have a batch of frozen pheasant wings sent to us courtesy of good friend Darik Tschetter of Ringneck Retreat in South Dakota. Tucker gets a big snout-full of those periodically and soon I will take to hiding them for search and recover missions around the yard and in the field.
For the month of May, Tucker and I were at our home in Arizona where we learned about swimming pools/swimming, scorpions, Oleander trees (poisonous) and other things desert-y. We took a side trip to Pasadena, California for a golf tournament where for whatever reason Tucker got sick. Let’s just say we had a few late night kennel soilings that continued on until we got back to AZ. Discovered that a little pumpkin pie filling mixed into his dry kibble would eventually firm things up and put smiles back on the faces of all involved. Thank god, that was wearing thin and certainly did not make Tucker happy either.
Back at home Tucker takes to the water like an old pro, matter of fact he went swimming yesterday at the East Lake Sammish boat ramp. He happily retrieves anything I throw out for him and swims feverishly to get after whatever that is. There was a local tame swan who swam over to investigate what Tucker was up to, wish I had gotten a picture. For all practical purposes Tucker is happy, fun & food loving, curious, affectionate, growing and ready to please. Oh and did I mention spoiled too? Stay tuned for more as we add Tova, a Bernipoo to our family in a week or so!