Evening walks

Almost every evening, the three of us - me, Bo and Daisy - go for a nice walk around the block. As I mentioned before, Daisy sometimes thinks it is her "job" to help me walk Bo. This is how that looks.




I think Bo tolerated it very well at first, but now that Daisy is getting SO much bigger, it's starting to irritate him. He looks at me, like in the second picture above, as if to say "ok, can you make her stop now?" The majority of the time, though, Bo loves his baby sister and is glad that he now has a playmate.

We live out in the county on a service road that has no outlet and therefore has very little traffic. Because of that, when we go for walks (at least for now) I don't put Daisy on a leash. I'm totally comfortable that the only reason she would run off from me would be to run to a neighbor we see outside while we're walking (everyone is a friend in Daisy's world). She sticks right by Bo and me. After all, she never lets me out of her sight, even in the house!

Bo, on the other hand, has to have a leash. He was already 6 moths old when I got him and, bless his heart, I was his fourth home (counting the home where he was born). So he didn't get that consistency that Daisy has had. He is gradually getting better now that she's around. But I couldn't take him for a walk without a leash for fear that he would run off into the field next to my house (a field that goes all the way to the Kentucky River, hence my concern.)

I guess that's a good thing about raising a puppy from the time it leaves its mother. Daisy sticks with me and has learned how to behave extremely well (she's exceptionally smart, too, but I won't brag!) She comes to me when called probably 98 percent of the time. She's housebroken. he knows how to tell me when she wants something (to eat, as we saw in the previous post, or when she is ready to go to bed.) And I can calmly say "no, no" when she's about to do something she shouldn't (like walk out of the yard without me being with her) and she stops what she's doing. Unless she's biting at Bo. But we're working on that. Of course a lot of this has to do with me being home with her so much of the time.

You can see in this video how well she walks without a leash.

The only bad thing about me not putting her on a leash at home is that when we go places and she has to wear a leash, she's not very fond of it. But she's getting better about it.

We were outside for quite a while tonight before going on our walk...mowing the yard (Daisy sits outside and watches), doing other yard work and visiting with the neighbors.

So when we finally came in for the night, I had one tuckered out little pup!