pet connection

The retriever litter I planned for years and finally bred last year is now 10 months old, at that point beyond cute puppy and nowhere near good dog. They are loved and they are learning, but they are collectively a pain in the ass for their collective owners right now.

Barring any disastrous  change of family circumstances — job loss, death, etc. — I’m not expecting any of these puppies to need rehoming, not now and not ever.  (Although of course I would be there should they need me, always.) They are all with long-time, experienced and successful owners of field-bred hunting retrievers. In fact, four of the six of us owners had puppies from the same litter before, more than 13 years ago.  My late Heather’s brother Bogey is the last of that litter, and his mom owns the former Blaze Orange Boy (BOB) puppy, now named Dooley, a/k/a The Big D.

The “D” does NOT stand for Dumbass.

My friend Alyce, who along with her husband owns two hunting retrievers besides Bogey and Dooley, is a music teacher, which means she has to find ways to keep a 10-month-old retriever puppy busy while she’s giving lessons.

Yesterday, she filled a Kong up with biscuit bits and canned cheese, and trusted that combination would keep Dooley busy for a while.

It didn’t, and soon she was hearing strange hissing sounds that were not coming from her student’s flute. Into the kitchen she went, where she discovered Dooley had taken the cheese can off the counter and quickly figured out how to work the nozzle to dispense the cheese. Most of it he got in his own mouth, but not without a certain amount of messy experimentation over every exposed surface in the general vicinity, including on one of the other retrievers, Sam.

As I said, all of the people who have Dooley and his sibs are very experienced. Alyce immediately noted that the mess was not Dooley’s fault, but hers. “I shouldn’t have left the can on the counter,” she said.

Funny thing: When it comes to living with and training working retrievers, I’m really the least accomplished of the bunch, by far. But I cope as best I can. Some 2,000 miles away, the One Who Chose Me, Dooley’s sister Faith, a/k/a FayBee, has earned herself three days at the doggie daycare center a week, to preserve my sanity while I work on the next book. The people at my day job think doggie daycare is a laughable extravagance, but I do not.

FayBee, a/k/a HellPuppy, runs for eight hours straight there, playing and body-slamming other high-energy dogs the whole time, and falls asleep on the ride home. A little training and food puzzles before dinner — I love those Nino Ottosson toys our Liz Palika first wrote about for this blog — and then my own 10-month-old PIA eats fast and crashes hard, becoming the most adorable 65-pound snuggle-bug for the night.

Field-bred retrievers, like work-bred terriers, are not for everyone, no matter how sweet (retrievers) or cute (terriers) people think they are. I am so, so grateful to have had my long-time friends Mary (who bred my McMommy dog, the darling McKenzie) and Katie (who owns the daddy, Zin) fly out here from TX and MN respectively eight months ago to evaluate the puppies and match them with experienced homes coast to coast.

I was grateful then, but I’m more grateful now. Because everyone loves a puppy, but it takes a crazyspecial person to love an adolescent canine athlete with brains, drive and determination, and a short attention span for anything of interest to a human, not a dog.

Fortunately, Jack, Parker, Dooley, Keen and Maya each have just that kind of crazyspecial person looking out for them. And so does Faith, even if I have to draw on a lot of my own faith to believe what I know in my heart:  that she’s going to be one hell of a great dog when she grows up.

And it shouldn’t take more than a few years to get there.

Images:

Top: Faith in motion, which is the norm. Mud and water are just a wonderful bonus.

Bottom: The best part of doggie daycare is an exhausted puppy. FayBee falls asleep in the car while I go pay the bill with gratitude.  iPhone photo, not the best, but you get the point.

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