Up to Date

I think at long last this blog is now just about up to date. My intentions for it were to catalogue the antics of Henry and his co-conspiritor Molly about once a week or whenever I felt like it and having spent the last few months recalling the best part of the last year I think it's safe to say that we can now start from now.

It's October 9th and the biggest part of news I can give you is that Henry seems to be completely housetrained. It's been over four weeks since he had an kind of accident in the house and he has at long last worked out that if he comes up to the bedroom in the morning I will instantly get up and let him outside for a wee - I'm not sure how he worked this out but I'm very pleased he did.

We think the biggest part in this momentous turn of events was to cut out the dogs breaksfast. Because Henry was such a skinny thing when he arrived we had to give him several meals a day. Food is Henry's biggest hobby in life and we think it was actually his stomach waking him in the morning and not his bladder (or bowels) and that once awake his system would begin to do it's stuff.

By cutting out the breakfast his stomach didn't bother waking and withing three days Henry was sleeping in until 8.00am - amazing considering he'd never managed to stay asleep much past 6.00am for the last ten months.

It wasn't easy. I began by spending a week at my parents, house training being so much easier there as the dogs slept in the room with us. I absolutely refused to feed the dogs before 8.30am. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they will always try to bring their feeding times forward by an hour and then if you give in they start trying to bring it forward by another hour and so on and so on... but it was a good start, although hard not to give in to the two of them standing at the kitchen door looking sad and hungry and trying to grind me down.

We came home from Mum and Dad's and spent a week at home before going away again in our caravan, somewhere again where the dogs sleep in close proximity to us. It was during this week that I decided to just leave out breakfast altogether. It was hard as the dogs tried every trick in the book to get some but I gave them the equivalent amount off breakfast on top of their dinner so they got the same amount of food and bingo, three days later Henry has completely forgotten about getting up at the crack of dawn and weeing everywhere. Deep joy and alleyulah!

The final test for this came this week on Monday when we had to go out at 2pm and got very delayed in coming back which meant the dogs were left in the house for 7 hours - they are never usually left at all except for a couple of hours here and there so we really expected and would have excused any accidents. But on our return we were amazed to find that neither dog had done anything. Brilliant.

As for antics and mad behaviour, Henry did try to throw himself through a stock fence yesterday after a mad hare hid quite successfully and then decided to dart out at the last minute. Other Half said that Henry would actually mince himself through the wire in the efforts to run after the hare before realising that it hurt and I think he was right. It's a bit of a nightmare round here at the moment because every few meters or so there is a hare or a couple of pheasants hiding in the hedgerows, all ready to leap out at Henry and run away. Still, it all makes for an exciting walk and also improves the muscles in my arms brilliantly.