A long week!

G'Kar has been with us a whole week now. He's a pound and a half heavier, better friends with Dune, and, maybe, a bit less ornery.

One thing for sure, this fellow is tenacious. He doesn't give up. At all. But, if you tell him "no" 5 or 6 times, he starts to get the idea. We were visiting a friend's place last night and after watching him play with their (much larger) puppy, they said, "Wow. He really is wilful!" We just nodded and said, "Welcome to our life."

He wouldn't stop chewing on my hand earlier this week, no matter what I did. "Ouch" didn't work. "No" didn't work. A tap under the chin only worked for a few minutes. Finally, holding his mouth closed worked and his chewing has reduced dramatically. After a week, though, "No" and a clap of the hands seems to be working.

The good news (the very good news) is that he's learning. He's a smart little bugger, for sure. He has a way of looking at you and thinking... you can see he working things out. He was chewing on my watch one day and wouldn't stop. I gave him a strong, growly "NO," and he stopped suddenly, then looked at me. He thought, looked at me again, and thought some more. Then he opened his mouth wide, pressed his tongue against my watch and pressed his teeth to the bottom of his tongue and mouthed my watch. You could almost hear him saying, "But... I'm not using my teeth!"

The primary training I've done with him are sit, down, come, and wait, along with the utterly necessary house training. He's progressing well with sit, for sure (the first real training we did with him). I started by doing clicker training and charging the clicker with treats. Then I held treats in my hand and let him paw and lick and mouth my hand, without giving him a thing. After a while, he finally sat, and then I clicked and treated. After repeating 5-10 minute sessions of this twice a day for a week, he now sits every time he wants anything, and I have to admit, it's pretty cute! We're now telling everyone who comes to visit to ignore him until he sits, and that's starting to work on him as well.

We did a circle-recall exercise this weekend with four people and he really, really got the idea of coming when called. We'll work on that as much as possible, of course, but that one 20-minute exercise was gold.

The poor guy had a tough day on Monday, the third day he was with us. We were going for a run in the field and, after our loop, we came back through another section of the field. Poor G'Kar ran into a cactus and broke a full arm off on his paw. He fell and yelped like he had been gutted. We've had this happen once before with Jet and she immediately bit off the cactus and got it stuck in her mouth (ouch!). This time, I grabbed G'Kar quickly and just barely managed to keep his mouth off the cactus. I got it off him and he was ok after a few minutes, but the problem now is, he will NOT go past the place where he ran over the cactus. He will fight the leash, whine, and even just lay on his back until I manage to get him past the area. The fields around here are filled with cacti, and even though in 16 years I've only had one dog step on one (two now) I'm worried that he might find another and be completely afraid of the field! Hopefully he can get over this fear.

He's coming when called about 90% of the time indoors and about 40% of the time outside, but that should continue to improve with time.