Pickles Loves to Swim

Mean Old Chickens

Pickles has developed an interesting relationship with our three chickens. He is very wary of them and somewhat afraid, but also enjoys taunting them. The chickens appear to have no idea that Pickles could destroy them and if he gets too close to one of them, it will charge at him. When feeling especially frisky, Pickles plays a game where he gets the chickens to chase him. He runs by one close enough that it will charge him and then runs away, circles around and zooms by another one, continuing around the yard doing figure 8s and seeing how close he can get to them or how far they will run after him. Sometimes he even grabs a toy and imagine he is playing keep away.

The chickens have discovered the deliciously raw meaty soup bones that we give Pickles and all three of them will run him off a bone and then stand there pecking at it while he watches longingly from a safe distance. He is too afraid of them to go take it back or to run them off himself. Once we run them off for him, he takes him bone and hides behind the bushes chewing on it; whenever, a chicken starts heading in his direction he picks it up and moves to a new location. The chickens are very bold about running him off if they catch him not paying attention.

Here they are with their stolen treasure.

Agility Jumps

After playing with agility jumps over the weekend, we decided to make our own. There are lots of plans all over the internet and pvc is pretty cheap. We made two jumps for about $20/each. You could make them for less, but we got threaded joints so that they are easily detachable. Pickles got the hang of it quickly.

He's not supposed to do any real jumping until he's 14 months old and his growth plates are closed. So we're keeping all the jumps low, below shoulder height and only asking him to do a couple jumps at time.

Pretty Pictures

Tricks!

Here is Pickles showing off all the tricks he knows.

Up up - means sit up with a straight back.  We taught this by luring him into the position with a treat.  It took quite a while for him to build up the stomach muscles to be able to do it.  I think we've been working on it off and on for a month.  Over the past week we've been focusing a lot on it and he finally has it!

Spin - turn around clockwise.  This was also a lure with the treat at first.  It didn't take him long to get away from the lure and only need a hand motion, but going from hand motion to only verbal without any hand signal took 2-3 weeks.  Now we're working on twirl which means turn counter clockwise.  I think he's learning it a lot faster, though he does tend to guess and spin if we don't give the hand motion quickly enough after the verbal cue.

Roll Over - he's known this one for quite a while.  Evvie helped us out working on it for the week she was here.  Now that he knows spin though sometimes he gets confused and stands up and spins instead of rolling over.

We're also working on bye bye - which means paw at the air twice, crawl which is crawling along the ground, and look cute which means cock your head to one side.

Another family reunion!

Pickles got to go up to Greeley this past Sunday to play with 4 of his siblings: Marni, Cider, Mia, and Aspen and his dad, Stella.  They have all grown up so much.  Pickles and Mia outlasted the rest of them playing for a solid 2.5 hours straight.  Aspen and Cider are the barkers in the videos.  Aspen has the tail.  Marni is the blue merle.  We also got to play around with Stella's agility equipment.  Hopefully, we will have our own soon.  Pickles went over the jumps easily and even went through the weave poles following a treat a couple times.

Mia, Aspen, Marni, Pickles, Cider (photo taken by Brandy)

 

 

Taking the Plunge

We really really hope that Pickles learns to love water.  So far he will splash along the edge but never go in past where he can stand.  He's spent a lot of time watching other dogs swim at the pond on South Boulder campus.  He runs back and forth along the edge whining because he can't get out to them.

Yesterday, we were up at Boulder Valley Ranch open space walking along a narrow deep creek.  A black lab came up and went straight into the water.  Pickles was standing on a steep bank whining to get to the dog and finally jumped in after him.  Surprisingly for him, the water was over his head, and he swam to the other side.  We called him back across, but he jumped almost the whole way and then clambered up the side.

At the very end of the hike, we came back to the creek.  Mark went around to the other side and called him across.  Pickles tried to run around over the bridge after him but there was a huge bush that he couldn't figure out how to get around so eventually, he swam!!