Adventures in Winter Recall

Our -12 degree potty routine, our three feet of snow potty routine, is send Elka out back, call her back when she's done. And she gets done pretty quickly, and with good efficiency, as I've mentioned. Lately, though, some of that distractibility has crept back. God knows why, it's still -12 some mornings, and there's still three feet of snow out there.

But, I've begun to utilize the three count. I'll tell her to go potty, I'll say hurry up, and then I start to count. If I reach 3, I call her back and we go inside. Mostly, she gets busy at 2, if I even need to count.

So we had a bit of weather....

Sunday night into Monday, it SNOWED here. Quite a lot. I have Mondays off now anyway, but the library even got a snow day.

It's a twofer!

So lately we've had a potty breakthrough. A strange thing to say as the owner of a five year old DOG, not child. But lately, when we let Elka out back, a few things have changed.

For one, we can let her out back and she runs out there and gets to business. Sometimes she'll bark at a squirrel or an imaginary squirrel first, and that's fine. It genuinely seems to be keeping them away. But then she poops or pees, and then she performs the other function as well, so you get what we refer to as a "twofer". 

This was not always the case, but either it's been too cold or Elka is growing up. She also used to, when turned out back without a leash, think it was obviously playtime and just gallop around in big circles. Or, if you stayed inside, she would bark at the house because you clearly had committed a grave error.

Of course, when it's not-winter we'll be taking her outside the fence again for her "business", not just letting her loose to poop willy nilly in the play space. When the thaw happens, we pick it up and rake things over and it rains a bunch besides. But perhaps the twofers will continue, even on leash? 

Elka understands what blankets are for, just not why they don't do what she wants

You know how they say dogs and their owners resemble each other?

Well, I haven't attained a supermodel physique like Elka's (yet!) but she definitely shares a very strong opinion with me: she doesn't like being cold.

Canine News Roundup

The weather is blah and my post is late and so you're getting some interesting dog news that I've seen recently. Enjoy!

Apparently many US athletes at Sochi are adopting stray dogs. Russia's official solutions to stray dogs in general, and at Sochi specifically, were heartbreaking at best, and but for the diligent work of some individuals forming rescues, many  many dogs would have been euthanized for the sake of public appearances. Our country has a stray dog problem as well, though at least they tend not to be viewed as "biological trash" (or one might hope not).

In other (and even happier?) news, scientists have discovered/decided that dogs do, in fact, know what we're saying. Or at least understand that we are speaking to them, as they have centers in their brain dedicated to speech, discovered in another study using MRI. They're also sensitive to emotions (but I'll be you knew that already!).

I last wrote about Detroit here in November (I think) when I posted about an organization who was doing "Thanksgiving Dinner" for Detroit's stray dogs. Well, on February 18, animal advocates in Detroit stayed overnight in dog houses, to "raise awareness about the dangers of leaving pets outside at night". I understand that my dog values are not everybody's dog values, nor are they necessarily common, but it blows my  mind that people will regularly leave their pets outside through all sorts of temperatures and weather. If they changed even one person's mind, it's worth it, and I hope they reached a lot of people, and changed a lot of minds. Dogs (and cats) die outside in the winter. They're mammals, just like people. These are not difficult facts.

Wordless Wednesday January 8 2014

Wordless Wednesday December 18 2013

Wordless Wednesday November 27 2013

An Announcement

All right. Due to my typical personal fall slow down (it's cold here now! [well, getting there] And did a rainy/snowy thing I did not like), I'm going to change my update schedule. I maintained Monday through Friday for awhile there, sometimes with Sunday thrown in, sometimes extra Tuesdays, etc. But I fell behind at some point, and have kind of done Monday through Wednesday, which strikes me as less than effective, with all of those empty days yawning before me.

So. I'm going to try switching to a Monday - Wednesday - Friday schedule, the same as I do with my writing blog. In a way, this is cheating, as we know Wednesday is Wordless, so I will make effort to maintain a Tuesday Tails contribution as well, and perhaps a Tasty Tuesday as applies (see, blog hops make things easy and motivating!)

But, especially with NaNoWriMo looming, I don't want y'all to think I'm totally ditching you. Because I'm not. I'm just writing a lot, and reading, and trying to get housework done and pay attention to this dog 'o mine and oh yeah, work. That working thing.

Snow, and 500th post!

Wow, post 500! How time flies, right?

We've gotten a lot of snow here, last week and this week. It held off for a good long time, really; most of the time, in Central New York, we have snow long before December. Sometimes even on Halloween, which as a child I certainly would have hated (though many of my Halloweens were rainy).

Elka likes the snow quite a lot. She bounds around in it, and runs as fast as she can. She tells us that she needs to go out, even though we know she's "empty", as it were, so that she can play in the snow. I admit, as a grumpy grown up (I liked the snow until I had to do things like drive in it), I don't always want to suit up and go outside and get cold and wet. But there are times that I do, because her joy is totally worth it.

I am, however, always ready to go back inside sooner than she is.

Wordless Wednesday December 5 2012

The Cold

Every winter, whether we like it or not, the cold does come. We people have done clever things like invent clothing and build houses to deal with it, in addition to having harnessed the power of Fire in the first place.

Dogs? They have fur. Most dogs, in fact, have lots of fur, in multiple layers. The Doberman, sleek breed that it is, does not have an undercoat. Elka's fur in particular reminds me of eyelashes, and when I find one of her hairs on me, or when she's not around, I wonder if it is, in fact, an eyelash or not.

So, thin glossy hair plus winter? Cold Doberman. A lot of the time, this also means sleeping Doberman.