Lur MacKenzie

Lur is feeling his old self again. He hasn’t bulked up to his size potential yet, but he may have just been bulky from puppy fat before he went away.
Someone else is interested in him. We are looking to hear from him today.
Actually, this brave soul wants both Lur and Reddy. he really loves the breed and figures they’d be good company for each other. And he’s right, it will make it easier to keep them happy in the long run, but TWO puppies is a real handful.
These two are real good guys, though. This week at puppy school, Reddy and I learned “leave it”.
Reddy got it in three tries.
3. What a smartie.
What you do is, you hold a treat right under their nose and say “no!” “Leave It!” and keep the treat right there, don’t let him have it and repeat yourself.
The minute he looks away from the treat, you give him the treat.
On try two, Reddy figured out that if he pretends like he doesn’t want it, he gets it. Pretty smart pup to find out how to get that treat so fast.
I could see his brain hook it up.
“Okay, can’t have the treat. What’s that she’s saying? leaveit, leaveit. hm”
Looks away, puzzled
“Oh, WOW I got the treat!”
“Look another treat! Boy this is my lucky day…what? NO? leaveit, hm “
Looks away by accident. Gets the treat!
The third time, he looked away almost immediately when I said leave it.
It was a good lesson, he actually was leaving treats all over the floor and just not giving it any energy, just leaving it. It was great. So I watched him figure that out and felt really lucky to be there. What a good dog. He even fell asleep during one long “leave it”, he was so casual about it.
I think he was tired from running around at the dog park earlier. We went to meet the guy who wants to adopt the boys. Reddy is the dog that this guy wanted from looking at the ad, but we took Lur along and he fell for both of them.
We are going to offer him free babysitting services.

So this morning I was doing the “leave it” with Lur, and he acted like he already knew all about it! I guess he was watching the lesson. DH had him around the store during Red’s class, he’s getting pretty socialized. It was Saturday and there were a lot of dogs at PetSmart. He’s not perfect, but he’s doing a lot better. I don’t think he’ll ever be one of those happy-go-lucky puppies that wiggle up to everybody, even if they are strangers. Cattle dogs are not usually like that, although I saw a couple of really friendly ACD pups in the store. Next time (if we ever have pups again) we will take them out in public before four months, to heck with the vet’s advice.
Turns out we are just a couple of over-protective old fogeys.