This morning we took the Gator
out to the pasture for his fourth farm jaunt, and then to the dugout.
He has the Gator thing figured out, no problem. As long as he stays out in front of it following the ladies where I can see him, I’ll follow along and he can run or walk or collapse in a heap or sniff or chew. When he gets tired or hot, he starts walking back toward me and I stop. He climbs in under my feet and lies down on the floor and then he gets to ride until he wants to get out again.
This is a PERFECT arrangement for working on impulse control, since the ladies will drop back and run beside us sometimes (they know the score and I have no worries about running over them) so they’re running and wrestling a couple of feet away from him and he’s calmly lying down and watching them. Perfect. After a while I stop and ask him if he wants to get out and he either gets out and joins them or lies where he is like a little king in his chariot.
Please note before anybody gets excited that this whole run is a little over a kilometre on soft dirt and pasture grass, and he isn’t doing most of it by any means. Lots of opportunity for exercise and ZERO possibility of over-exercising his “dainty little growth plates”.
Then we arrived at the dugout. Syn and Stitch waded right in while Spider went in to the tops of his toes and examined the water. Pawed it a lot. Drank half of it. While he was pawing the water he pulled up some water plants and then he was plunging his whole head in grabbing the plants and flinging them around. Then I threw some stuff for Syn and he ended up in the water above his elbows hoping to grab stuff from Syn as she went by.
And he doesn’t have a urine infection, polydipsia-polyuria. He drank too much, so he peed too much so he drank too much so he peed too much until it was running right through him and he got thirstier and thirstier. Physically and mentally impossible to housetrain a puppy with pd-pu. So tomorrow I’ll be back to taking him out every 15 minutes and monitoring his intake for a couple of days.