Dumbbell & Backy-upy

We started training a formal dumbbell retrieve last week and its been (so far and touch wood) surprisingly easy to train. I had attempted to teach Pepper a hold command with normal objects about 6months ago but she never really got it, so I imagined lots of dropping and chewing of the dumbbell. But we just started right from the beginning with tiny baby steps and she rapidly (within 5 minutes!) had a good sustained hold with no mouthing. Such a good girl. And man does she love the dumbbell, we worked lots on building drive for it and now she starts to screech and bounce and yowl when I get it out.

Because its been so wet we've done most of the training inside, I can tell you that a wooden dumbbell vs wooden floors isn't the best, wish we had carpet!

Last night I taught her the turn around and back up between my legs trick. She thought it was very exciting, although would get a little confused and start offering the occasional backwards circle (which shes never been taught) or would just spin and leap.

No, she didn't topple the palm tree, it fell down in the storm we had last week. But its been a source of amusement, with lots of bits to rip off and drag into the house. Such fun.

Cross-country Dog

Poor Pepper. I'm taking my horse withdrawals out on her.

Found an off leash park on the road out to Murawi beach that also has an arena and a cross-country course, so naturally she was encouraged to play horsey and zoom around and over some of them.

Weeeee over the wall

Down a bank

Bigggg jump

Its actually suprisingly difficult to co-ordinate getting the dog over jump, while holding/throwing the ball and trying to taking pictures.

And this is what I would really like to be doing again :( Soon hopefully, when I'm rich and own a farm.

Weeeeeeeeeee

Big bad earthquake

Everyone in NZ will know all this but for those of you that don't live here, there was a big earthquake on Saturday in Canterbury (which is in the middle of our South Island). It struck at 0435am and was a 7.1 on the Richter scale. It has caused widespread damage to property across the region but incredibly and thankfully there has been no loss of life (although a Lemur did die at the zoo - he drowned) We used to live (and work) in Christchurch and our families live south of there. I imagine it's been a pretty horrible two days for everyone, especially my old workmates in the Christchurch Emergency Department.

Pictures of the devastation

Now something lighter - I saw how lots of other people had taught their dogs to get a tissue out of the box and and bring it over so we played around with this one afternoon (and destroyed an entire box of tissues in the process) Such fun! Such mess......

And Pepper has another poor sore paw - its on the big pad in the middle of the right leg this time. This is the third separate pad infection in 6 weeks so discussed with the vet today and if another one crops up we're planning to do biopsies to see if there's anything weird (like an auto-immune disorder) that causing them. Back on yet more bloody antibiotics in the mean time.