Day 3 at Home with Maple

So far, Maple is doing well. We took her to the vet on friday for a quick check up and to be microchipped. She weighed in at 6.0 kg (13.2 lbs), so she is not a small girl, but she is a very healthy one! It is very hard to take a good picture of Maple. Either she is moving, so the pic is blurry, or the light is not right, and with her dark colouring the picture turns out not very good. We'll keep working on it though.

Maple and Gromit have sorted out all their dominance issues. Maple is having a hard time understanding that a 12 year old male dog is not a maternal sort, nor one that wants to rough house with a puppy. But Gromit has accepted Maple into the pack fairly well. He does allow her to jump on him occassionally when they are outside, and several times when Gromit has been playing with us and one of his rubber bones, he has purposely given the bone to Maple to play with for a few minutes, before very gently taking it away from her again. He has even allowed her to scavenge in his food bowl once he has finished eating.

She is starting to learn that peeing is something that should be done outside. Last night she awoke at 4:00am needing a pee. I took her outside, but Maple did not like the cold, wet grass and constantly ran back to the door. I knew that if I let her back in she would run to the newspapers for a pee, so I persevered by taking her back out to the grass. I even went and got some newspapers and put them out on the grass, and then patio, but to no avail, she just wanted in again. So, after 1/2 an hour I woke up the Bored Dad and asked him to come outside and have a pee to show Maple what to do. She was quite interested, and after watching and then sniffing the area where Bored Dad peed, Maple immediately began sniffing around for a good spot, and went pee herself. We rewarded her with a treat, lots of praise, and of course the main prize for having a pee was being allowed back into the nice, warm, dry house!

We have started clicker training with her. As soon as she hears us pick up the clicker she runs over. She is getting fairly reliable with sit and come when there are no distractions. We will start her in puppy pre-school very soon

We haven't yet started retriever training with her. She will chase after a toy, but does not yet bring it back to us, so this is something that we will work on soon. Her favourite toy is a stuffed mallard duck, so we will work on playing fetch with that for the start of training retrieving.