Murray River Curly Coated Retriever circa 1893

This was posted on an Australian dog breeders forum on this page.

A Few Observations

Murray River Curly Coated Retrievers have the softest fur I have ever felt on a dog. There is no undercoat, and Maple's fur is still quite short given that she is only 9 weeks old, so I can't bury my hands into her coat, but it feels so nice to pet her.

Maple seems to have dry skin or something similar. She scratches quite frequently, yet she does not have fleas. We are trying to feed her some more oily type foods like sardines occassionally and mixing a teaspoon of cooking oil into her food so hopefully she has some relief soon.

MRCCRs seems to be a very intelligent breed. Training Maple is going extremely well. She knows sit, come, stay, drop, and is learning give. Of course, she only can do these commands as long as there are no distractions which are more interesting. She knows she needs to sit for her food, and automatically sits down in front of me when I call her to come to me. She tries very hard to please us.

Maple loves to chew on rocks. We have lots of driveway size stone in our yard, so we need to contantly supervise. She also likes to chew on the corner of the brick walls on the outside of the house.

She has fantastic eyesight and can find anything new on the floor or in the yard that shouldn't be there and will pick it up in her mouth.

Maple is growing quickly. I weighed her on the bathroom scale yesterday and she was up to 16lbs (approx 7.27 kg), but I am not sure how accurate that is compared to the vet's scale from last friday. She is defnitely taller and longer than she was a week ago.

She Slept the Whole Night Through

We took Maple to bed last night at around 10:30pm. She went happily into her crate and went straight to sleep without a whimper.

This morning when we got up at 6:15 we had to encourage Maple to get up to go out for a pee - she was too snug and warm in her crate to want to go out in the cold frosty dark early morning.

The crate was dry, so we didn't sleep through her needing a middle of the night pee. Yea!

Some Pics

We've Had a Few Breakthroughs!

Yesterday and this morning things have suddenly started to click with both Maple and Gromit.

Maple is starting to go to the door to indicate when she needs to pee and poop.

Last night she slept through from 10:00pm to 5:00am. At 5:00am I took her out for toileting. It took a half hour to convince her to do her business on the cold, frosty grass, but finally she did. When she came back into the house, she happily crawled back into her crate and went back to sleep without a whimper. And she didn't want to get up until 7:00am when Gromit was agitating to go out. I think the training we did just before bed time helped to tire her out.

She can now come and sit on command. She can nearly drop on command, but still needs the encouragement of following the treat down to the floor from sit.

Maple is doing quite well with learning bite inhibition. She is not a nippy dog so this makes teaching bite inhibition quite easy.

Gromit is allowing Maple to play and even rough house with him.

Gromit allowed Maple to share his bed for a couple of minutes this morning.

More pictures to follow soon.

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.

Here She Is!

We picked Maple up this afternoon at the airport. She cried for about 2 minutes in her crate in the car, and then settled down and slept most of the way home.

Once we got home she was very timid and it took a bit of time to coax her out of her crate. She was sticking to us all very closely, and looking cuddles from everyone.

After about an hour she is now much more comfortable at home. She is trying to engage Gromit in play, and playing with some of her toys.

It is proving very hard to take a good picture of Maple, however, as she thinks that the camera is a toy and as soon as she sees it in my hand she runs over to try to play with it, grabbing the strap and trying to grab the actual camera itself.