Shortly after the last update, and rather at the last minute, we were invited to bring Venn along to the November SARDA Wales training for some pre-acceptance puppy work. I had a restless night thinking about our previous puppy-school experiences, but in the event (and against expectation) she acquitted herself pretty well and made a reasonable impression. Her winter jacket arrived just in time for the first snow of the season.
So far so good.
A little later on in the month we packed the caravan and headed up to Northumberland for a week of relaxing and exploring new ground. They say a change is as good as a rest, but for Venn the change served to give us very little rest indeed.
For reasons best known to herself, she started waking at around 5:00 a.m. and the associated yodelling was not that great for the other campsite users. The usual “quiet” instruction, which has a reasonable effect at home, did not do the trick, so reluctantly I crawled out of bed to bring her in with us (yes I know, “rod for own back”). This worked on the first night, but on the second I clearly did not move fast enough to avoid her discovering how to escape from her fabric travel-crate. Fortunately I had been sufficiently speedy such that she had not got around to escaping from the awning (which she also taught herself to do early in the stay). On the third night, she bypassed our counter-measures by finding an alternative way of escaping her crate, and spent the remainder of her holiday sleeping in her metal traveling crate from the back of the car.
Although there were other campers on the hard-standing pitches of the site, the camping field was empty, and the (very) early starts gave us time to keep on with our training sessions. I’d made a mental note to try and get on top of walking on a slack lead and walking to heel over this break, and down in the field it seemed like we might have been making a bit of progress. However, what little skill that had been acquired was certainly not proofed against the distractions of our first visit into a town and she was a complete nightmare. I made a valiant attempt to insist on not moving forward until she stopped pulling, but when it took us the best part of 30 min to get up a short street, I ended up picking her up and carrying her back to the car.
Another “challenge” we experienced on the busier streets and in pubs, was the issue of people encouraging her to jump up and say hello, despite our best attempts to ask them not to. The usual response was “oh we don’t mind, we know dogs” but this was of little consolation to the small child on the muddy riverside path in Durham who ended up with paw-prints on his face, despite not really knowing dogs at all. Fortunately, his mother just thought it was funny.
The final black-mark in Venn’s copy-book came towards the end of the holiday. Her recalls have been pretty good in general, though fly-bys were not unheard of, but we got into a situation where she simply would not come back to us. We needed to get her on a lead to cross a field of sheep, but she just got more and more giddy running around us. With a busy road at the other end of the field we did not have many options and we spent about 20 min trying out strategies that did not seem to be obviously chasing her (and therefore rewarding the behaviour). A very stressful few minutes, but I reminded myself that we briefly had this same problem with the very lovely Tess, and she still turned out very lovely. This too shall pass!
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