02-26-2009

The family has been sick so Duece's training has been somewhat on the backburner. I had to make a trip into town today so Duece rode along. He just doesn't like the crate in the back of the suburban or maybe it's the movement of the vehicle while he rides in the crate. He starts salivating so bad his chest and front legs get soaked. Then he ends up vomiting if the trip gets too long. Today's trip was too long.

When he unloads from the suburban he rolls in the snow looking like he's trying to clean off his chest and legs. When we got home today, Duece got a bath. He was about as impressed with the bath tub as he is about going for a ride. The Aussie can store a lot of water in their hair, even after we thought he was fairly dry. He then ran around the living room rolling over on the rugs and dog pillows trying to dry himself off. We had to keep him in the house until he dried as the outside temp was hanging around the zero to a degree above or below and the wind was howling.

Later on we locked the other dogs upstairs and we played in the basement. 'Sit', 'down', 'wait' were the games. We tried to walk around him in a "down - wait" and it went fairly good. He just won't sit still if I try to step over him. We did do game where he was in the "down - wait" mode and a treat was placed on the floor about a foot or so from his nose. He thought it was okay to crawl over to it and I had to place my hand on his back to keep him there a couple of times, but we did get about 3 or 4 minutes of him staring at the treat or giving me the evil-eye.

Once he finally got to eat the well-watched-treat, we walked around the basement playing "Check" and "Git up" where I held a treat out of his reach and he had to either stand up with his paws up on something, or jump up on something to get the treat. Some dogs are pretty wary of things they aren't accustomed to, so we jumped up on the treadmill (shut off of course), some Rubbermaid storage containers and other things. One place had a small square stool in front of it and he got a treat for putting his front legs on it. Then he actually climbed up on it with all 4 paws and stood with his front paws up on a large box to get his treat. I can see we're going to need some agility type equipment to keep Duece and his friend Ziva, the incorrigible corgi busy and out of trouble this summer.