great game

Needless to say, the dogs are still loving the snow. Me, not so much, because the car's been in the garage all week (petrol does not belong in a diesel tank, but that's another story, it turned out to be a bad weekend, vehicularly speaking) and I'm discovering how treacherous pavements can be when they're turned into toboggan runs.

A friend of mine who lives somewhere in Wisconsin in the USA recently referred to something she called "snow duty". I think that involves basically shovelling the snow off your drive and the pavement outside your house so that the walkways are clear. We don't get snow often enough over here for that to be a thing, so we just let it pack down and freeze and then it's every man, woman or child for themselves.

Talking of children. Lottie is going through a "phase". She's a bright dog, knows all the basic commands now and one or two tricks. Her "stay" and her "recall" is supurb. In the classroom.

Out of the classroom she's a bit of a rebel who just wants to have fun. So if she picks something up, and she is something of a compulsive kleptomaniac, whether she's allowed to have it or not, she won't come anywhere near you. She thinks it's a great game. 

If you let her off the lead in the park, even if you have her ball as enticement, she won't come anywhere near you. Her recall remains good; she sees another dog and goes charging over to greet them, call her name and she screeches to a halt, turns around and comes straight back to you. To within about ten feet. Then hovers, teasingly out of reach, laughing at me.

Which is fine, unless you want to take the ball back to throw it again, which is silly because she loves to chase and retrieve. Or you want to put her back on the lead because you've been throwing the ball in the park for the last hour and now your fingers have turned to ice and you want to go home. Again, she thinks it's a great game.

So for now, whenever she's off lead, she's going to be attached to the longline of shame; a thin, 10m long leash that's designed to be dragged behind the dog, not held. So if I tell her to stay, she'll damn well stay because I'll be stood on it.

They are not without their perils. A friend of mine was silly enough to hold the end of one recently (I see this a lot when out and about) and her dog, similar size and weight to Lottie, bolted off after something and the snatch broke two of her fingers.

They also have a habit of running rings around you, and a couple of loops are enough to pull you off your feet if they get it right.

It's a great game. But then everything is, to a big puppy.