(no subject)
yesterday cooper made a new friend. his name is jigs, and he's an english mastiff who turned a year old last week. he weighs 160 lbs; that's a hefty puppy! (at 3.5 months, cooper weighs a whopping 6.9 lbs.) anyway, he and cooper had a blast rolling around the lot at work. jigs was amazingly patient and gentle with cooper, who can be rather overbearing; jigs finally just laid down and let cooper maul him.
today, shawlene and i went to the AKC dog show. it was SO much fun seeing the millions (ok, probably closer to a thousand...) dogs there, of every shape and size. we watched the agility trials for quite awhile, and spent the rest of the time wandering around admiring all the canine goodness. it was really awesome to see so many of each breed at once, like seeing two dozen great danes, or 18 pomeranians. we met LOTS of really nice dogs, and saw lots of others pulling their owners around and barking up a storm, which made us feel better about cooper's style of leash-walking (pull, pull, pull harder!)...i mean, these were show dogs, and some of them didn't act any better than coop. so there!
we came home and watched best in show again; what a great movie, and after today, we realized how accurately it portrays the dog show world!
then we decided to work with cooper on his skills a bit. he's had sit down since he learned it last week. we started working on stay a few days ago, and he's getting quite good at it, too. tonight, we added lay down, and he learned it in 10 minutes. honestly: 10 minutes! THEN we decided to test him and see if he's been paying attention to the hand signals we use with each command, and we put him through his paces using hand signals only...he aced it. he will sit, lay down, and stay with only visual commands.
i'm impressed as hell.