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[onetrickponies]

Happy Thanksgiving! Or just happy Thursday, if you don't do the whole Thanksgiving thing.

I'm all puppy'd out. Nine-month old puppy + three-month old puppy =/= relaxing break. I'm starting to think that booking a flight back for tomorrow was in the best interest of my sanity, but time feels so short having done that.

Day 22: 36,735 words, 73.5%

Comments

[fyrethief]

Puppies! YAY! *cuddles* What kind of puppies? Labs? (I remember you saying you bred them)

[onetrickponies]

Yup, labs! Luckily one is black and one is yellow so we can tell them apart...

We don't actually breed them, the Guide Dogs for the Blind foundation does. We train them and raise them, but we've baby sat enough puppies from our training group that it feels like we're breeding them! The three-month old is our newest pup in training; the nine-month old was one we adopted because she was career-changed early on for a liver problem.

[fyrethief]

Aww. :) Cute!

Oh yeah, I remember now. I was close! So the nine-month one with liver problems -- when you say you "adopted" her, do you mean properly, as in she's now your pet, or is it that she's been changed to guide dog when they discovered her liver problem?

[onetrickponies]

Yup, she's now our pet. The way things work is the puppies go to raisers when they're about two months old for basic training (sit, stay, etc) and socialization (going out into public, like stores and restaurants) and then after a year to a year and a half they go back to the foundation for their formal training, which is broken into ten stages, and once they get through all ten stages they get partnered with someone who's blind or visially impaired. Our nine-month old went back to the foundation because of health problems shortly after she was placed with a puppy raiser and it turned out she had a liver shunt, so she was career changed then and there. Normally career changes happen during formal training, either for health or behavioral issues, but our pup pretty much missed the whole guide dog training process in order to treat her liver shunt

[onetrickponies]

Very riotous! Their idea of play seems an awful lot like fighting over toys and chasing each other around and around. And then someone has to do their business outside, so then the other one has to as well...argh.

[onetrickponies]

Awww! Our little one holds her own. She clamps on and doesn't let go, which makes our older pup squeal. The older one's kind of a pansy when it comes to self defense. :P It doesn't help that the little one can squeeze through spaces and under things where the other can't get to.