Monday, January 07, 2008

Definitly a WHITE Weekend, But Also a BLACK and BLUE One.

OW-CHA! I am a collection of bruises held together by stiff muscles. I blame the sore muscles on all the snow shoveling, but the bruises are the work of Timber, Smokey and Paco.

I thought I was getting Smokey's jumping all over me under control. Actually, that was really wishful thinking on my part - that I could retrain that dog to not be a jumper in just a couple of days was really overly optimistic. It seemed to me that he was landing less blows, though I probably just got better at dodging them. All that went out the window with the introduction of Timber. Unbelievable as it may seem, he is a smaller dog, yet a bigger bouncer than Smokey. OUCH!

Then Paco arrived, just as big as Smokey and just as ill mannered.

Now that there were three of them, they didn't even try to contain themselves.

I tried blocking them with my knee - they were on to that pretty quickly. Soon, every raised knee hit a shin or a shoulder bone and never a soft chest. I was getting the negative reinforcement more than they were. Then, I tried just putting my hand to their necks, ala Dog Whisperer. That worked pretty well to deflect them until my hand started hitting shoulder bones instead of necks. I learn my lesson pretty quickly that time, too.

Well, at least one of us is trainable.

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