ADOLESCENCE. At seven months and 30kg, our little black shadow has doubled in size and become something of a force of nature.
Big, boisterous and overly friendly, there’s nothing subtle about our Ted.
As curious as he is clumsy, his furry snoot is quick to nose into everyone’s business, intrigued to find out what’s happening.
A sweet-natured soul, like most puppies he’s very excited about life. But he’s also at the age where leaping up on an unfamiliar child or older person could do serious damage, so training has been a top priority for several weeks now.
The trouble is, now that he’s a fully fledged leg-cocking teenager, he’s too old and over-exuberant for basic puppy socialisation classes and hasn’t completed the foundation course fundamentals that would normally secure him a place on “bronze”-level courses.
There’s no shortage of training courses, it seems, but finding the right one in the right place at the right time has been harder.
Thankfully, Teddy’s been a quick learner and has been picking up a lot of the basic skills that would prepare him for a more formal training environment.
The great news is that he’s sleeping through the night and seems to relish the comfort and peace of his crate.
Those early whimperings that were such a worry in the first few days have become a distant memory, and he seems properly settled in now, an intrinsic part of the family after the disruption of those early days before we found him.
He’s been out and about exploring the local woods too, though until we can be 100% sure of his immediate recall, it’s hard to find spots sufficiently remote to be confident about letting him off the lead.
Being a labrador, he loves the water (the muckier the better, of course) and he’s predictably hungry, though perhaps not as singlemindedly food-motivated as some of his breed.
Which all means our sleek, shiny, bouncy boy is great company but needs to learn a few lessons about manners, over-excitement and how to cope with overwhelming distractions like squirrels, strangers and any other dogs he encounters.
He can sit, stay, lie down and walk to heel in short bursts when there are no such distractions: especially early in the day or later at night when other dogs are not around.
But a favourite pastime when off the leash is to race at high speed past you while carrying leg-smashingly huge sticks, so he can’t be trusted if anyone vulnerable is around.
A double-ended smart new training lead and harness has been partially effective in curbing the worst of the pulling, and scatter-feeding can be a helpful distraction on occasions too, but there’s no doubting that Ted can be high-octane company.
There are times, too, when it’s easy to believe from the look in those expressive brown eyes that he’s quite deliberately setting out to wind you up. That insolent side-glance when he slips onto the sofa and stubbornly refuses to get off, for example.
But I rather like Susan Garrett’s belief in the mantra that our dogs are doing the best they can with the education we have given them, in the environment we’ve asked them to perform in.
In other words, if they’re not doing what we want them to do, it’s probably not because they are being deliberately fickle but because we haven’t trained them properly, or are expecting too much of them in the situation we’ve put them in.
Time to get that training programme sorted, then. Watch this space. It’s a steep learning curve for us as much as him….
