Saturday 7 March 2009

Quiet Week

As I said in the previous post I've been catching up on some training with Henry and it's going really well.

The biggest thing is to get him to come back if he is off the lead (which he isn't unless he has escaped), so every single time he's been out in the garden and sometimes on a walk (am still forgetting to take the treats with me grrr!) I'm calling him and instantly giving him a treat.

Well, it's working. It's a bit of a pain to remember the treat every time he comes in from the garden but what made me realise it was working was when I said his name out on a walk to try and stop him from pulling and he instantly turned round and ran the length of his vast expanding lead back to me, brilliant!

All I need to do is keep it up and really condition him to come to me every single time.

On the Badger front, things have been getting big. He has completely outgrown his bed. This is the bed which when I bought it made him look like a small potato lying in the middle of a kingsized bed. Now I think he out grew the bed a couple of weeks ago but Other Half insisted that it was still ok, until yesterday morning he was in his cage digging and moaning allot and when he stopped he let out a huge sigh. I looked over and there he was laying half on and half over his bed while looking at me with a complaining expression.

This was a bit of a pain as I really didn't have the cash to buy a new bed this week, so I carefully folded a spare duvet into the exact size of the cage and wrapped it in a lovely fleece blanket and now we can't keep Badge out of his cage. He's in there all the time perfecting the art of dog relaxation in every position he can manage!

I've also had an attack on the living room carpet. It was looking decidedly grubby but I really couldn't work out why until I tried to remove a small coffee stain from it and while rubbing away I noticed that about half a million dog (Badger) hairs came up. So I got a carpet cleaning spray for freshening carpets up, sprayed it over the carpet and got down on my hands and knees and rubbed the carpet all over in circular motion and I reckon I got a whole Badger out of it. I think the carpet probably enjoyed it too!

We now have a lovely fresh smellying and new looking carpet again. All I hope is that this was Badgers fluffy puppy hair coming out and that it's not a permanent shedding thing as we'll have to buy a new hoover that beats the carpet.

2 comments:

MBNAD woman said...

I've got bad news on the colliwobble hair front. I hoovered a spare Mossie every week. We used to say we could knit a spare Bella but at least she was roughly the same colour as the carpets. His dark hairs were long and disturbingly crinkly and we kept finding them in strange places like the inside of the shower door. Since he would only put his nose around my bathroom door as bathrooms were bad news for him, I can only assume he was having a quick shower and shampoo when I was out at work! Anyway, I could never work out why there were only dark hairs and there never seemed to be hairs from the ruff. Well, I think I've stopped hoovering up the black hair apart from the odd stray but the ones from the ruff have been turning up this last few weeks. I guess they were just buried under the other sort. Or I'm not only Mad but also a bit of a slut!
Badger's new bed sounds just the ticket. Mossie learned to love his beds - when he first arrived he wouldn't lie on his bed but lay by the side of it. After a couple of days he realised that there was no-one to shove him off it and that was it. Result :-)
I do so enjoy reading the tales (of tails) of Henry, Molly and Badger. Keep well.

Henry the Leaphound said...

Oh no! I thought greyhound hair was bad enough, even though I knew I was on to a good thing with them in that department as they don't have allot!

I found it really sad finding Fergus and Bonnie hairs after they'd gone, but I have to admit to laughing at the mystery Mossie hairs in the shower, we have the same sort of thing happening in this house and strangely it's only Badger hairs that get into places they shouldn't...