Meet Ted!

Meet Ted!  Ted is a 14 week old, Great Pyrenees, puppy we adopted from a sheep farm at 6 weeks of age. His parents are working dogs from the farm and a neighboring farm.  They were bred to create additional guarding help.  Ted was the smallest of the litter.  That's hard to believe looking at him now!

Ted has made a very good transition to suburban life.  Besides being very young (and thus needing to eat and potty at more frequent intervals), the most difficult challenge with Ted to date has been the fact that he came home with fleas.  Thankfully, we assumed Ted would have fleas due to his origins and did not bring him into the house or into contact with our adult Great Pyrenees/Golden Retriever mix.  Given Ted's age and the subsequent limited treatment options, we gave Ted Capstar, an oral tablet, and gave him daily baths with an all natural flea shampoo.  We also kept him in a pen on a tile floor downstairs until we were fairly certain the fleas were gone.  He pottied in the front yard as not to infest the yard with fleas.  This also gave our older dog, Alicia, the chance to see Ted and become accustomed to his presence, before meeting him face to face. Having heard that fleas can be an ongoing nightmare for dogs and owners, we are beyond thankful to report that Ted no longer has fleas!  Yay!  Ted also had two sets of puppy shots and wormings.  He met the vet and received a clean bill of health.  Way to go, Ted!

Ted is a very independent puppy.  He's potty trained easily and early.  In fact, Ted has only had 2-3 accidents in the house.  To date, similar to our Golden Pyrenees, he does not potty in other people's yards and he has slept through the night for several weeks now.  I will confess that we have a doggy door, were diligent in taking him out every two hours, watching him while he was awake, and that my beloved husband was took the majority of the middle-of-the-night shifts.  This mommy is getting too old for things like that!  

Ted is learning to walk on a lead nicely.  We walk him to pick up our girls from school daily and I also take him to the nursing home to visit my mother, who just moved from our home to the nursing home a few months ago.  Like most puppies, he has his moments of not wanting to walk where we want him to, but he has been generally cooperative recently.  Taking our older dog with us helped that process, or I suspect we would have been dragging or carrying him more.  

I have recently started walking both dogs on a joined lead.  I started this mostly to include both dogs in the walks as well as to avoid tripping over their double leads.  After the first couple of walks, it's been a great solution.  I am not having any issues with this, although I would like to hear what our trainer thinks about the subject.  It's something I've never tried to do or done before.

Speaking of training, we started classes with our former trainer, Peggy Moran.  Peggy helped us train our first puppy, Sampson (a Beagle), almost 15 years ago.  Sam's training was very successful and he worked with my in my private psychotherapy practice for 6 years.  Sam recently died peacefully, in his sleep at home, at age 15.  This left our Golden Pyrenees very lonely and we embarked on Ted's adoption journey. The purpose of this blog is to share our training experience with our trainer and fellow students, and to gain insight into better training techniques!

Now it is my husband's turn to blog!  Thanks for reading and have a great day!

PS:  Here's a link to Peggy's website:  http://www.dogimprovement.com/