Today we had a surprise visit to the vet, because we were supposed to give a part of a de-worming tablet yesterday, but we both forgot how much exactly.

So, I called the vet in the morning and we paid a visit. It turned out that we didn’t need to give the tablet until the end of August, so we did a lot of other small procedures instead. The vet has also weighed her – our little Freya has gained some weight! Our 19-weeks old girl is 7.3 kg as of today. She is finally catching up with the normal size of Lab pups!

See a difference between a a month and 10 days ago and today:

20.06.2015 – the day we adopted Freya, supposedly 3 months of age

30.07.2015 – 4 months and 1 week

How do dogs understand absence of their owner

Reading this article on dogs’ understanding of the absence of their owners, I was hoping to learn more about what Freya goes through when I leave her at home alone for a couple of hours. Instead, I have bumped in two interesting thoughts which I didn’t expect from an article with such a name.

Firstly, it states

In the end, there is no need to worry that your dog will forget you while you are gone for an extended time period.

Secondly, it says

If a dog’s caretaker leaves for a long period of time, it will likely go through a grieving period. It’s a loss—an unpredictable loss—because the person can’t say, ‘I will be back in two weeks.

Both of them are interesting from the point of view of the very vacation I am on right now. We’ve had Freya for 3 weeks. After this, we were gone for two weeks. How will she react?

(Oh please don’t start lecturing me on how irresponsible it was to take a dog, knowing that I shall be going on a vacation in less than a month! You don’t know in which miserable conditions Freya had to exist before we took her. If we didn’t take her then, she would’ve been given up to a local animal shelter full of old sick street dogs, doomed to exist God knows how long until found and rescued by someone… or struck by a disease. She wasn’t given any worm medication or vaccinations before we took her. We have given her a warm home and food and a share of happiness and belonging. She would have been miserable, and maybe even no longer alive in the conditions she had.)

Do you have any previous experience with leaving your dog alone for longer than 4-5 hours? Maybe days? Did you leave the dog at a dog pension, or with a puppy-sitter? How was it? Did your dog remember you once you were back?

Stop the 77

77% of dog bites come from the FAMILY dog or a FRIEND’S dog. Don’t let it happen to you!

I didn’t know this. Please watch these two videos, and see what you may have been missing: what your dog is desperately trying to tell you!

Please share this vital info far and wide!

Credits to Lili Chin on DoggieDrawings.net

Origins and consequences: The Beginning

Here are some pictures from the website which offered Freya and her siblings for adoption:

Our little Freya got the biggest share of attention here! 🙂 (When I saw these pictures, I knew that we need to rescue exactly that chocolate puppy, and not any other one!)

What are your bets, ladies and gentlemen, which breeds are mixed in this litter?

As a reminder, their mother is a black purebred Labrador, and the father is an unknown mongrel.

Credits for this awesome drawing to Lili Chin from DoggieDrawings.net.

This is the first of the series of posts on doggie body language / canine behaviour research. These posts will be grouped up under the Category “Learning to “Speak Dog””. Inspiration and ideas from blog Tails from the Lab, “Learning to “speak dog”: A canine behaviour series”.

Origins and Consequences: And now my watch begins

Freya was adopted at the age of approx. 3 months. Freya’s mother is a black purebred Labrador. No-one knows who fathered Freya and her siblings. How to identify her breeds?

Knowing at least some of her mix of breeds is important in order to identify her traits and characteristics, to predict her trainability, and to explain some of her actions. Knowing at least approximately breed specifications will to some extent predict us, how might she behave with birds, with water / swimming, with other animals – will she try to herd them? Hunt them? Befriend them?

This post hereby opens the search for Freya’s ancestors!

The Beginner’s Guide to Freya, now available!

Today we are leaving to a vacation, and Freya will be taken care of by a big-hearted puppy-sitter, who herself has a Lab puppy. So so sad we can’t take Freya with us! I wish we would have found and adopted her earlier, so that by now she’d have all necessary vaccinations…

We are proudly presenting our Guide for Temporary Owner, telling the most basic things about Freya’s daily behaviour. (I have referred to this masterpiece being created in my Wednesday post “The Beginner’s Guide to Freya“.) Read and enjoy 🙂

I can’t wait to see our girl again once we’re back! If she continues in the spirit of the current growth curve, she should be double her size as of now!

Today another piddle pad has been shredded to pieces. Crime scene:

Snails and snuggles

Photographer: Belen Argueso Castelos

Freya has discovered snails.

She turns them around, plays with them like they’re a ball, then takes them into her mouth and carries somewhere different place. Ensuring the snail will never get where it wanted to get 🙂

Tonight we let her stay in the room where we sleep. This was a disaster, she wasn’t sleepy at all, dropping stuff on the floor, making sounds, doing everything which kept us up. Tomorrow night she is going back to her time-out zone. Freya needs to learn that dark time is reserved for resting of her humans, and no attention will be offered to her during that time.

In the morning she peed all around the hallway while I was dressing to take her out… after that, she felt like biting me, and we had a very serious talk about that if she’s not gonna be a good girl, I’m not taking her to the office today. She knows that she is supposed to pee only on the white piddle pad when at home, and on the “good days” it really works, but today… After our talk, Freya took an apologizing pose and was all wiggly wobbly. I will see on the lunch break, how she kept her good girl posture.

Today’s her second vaccination day. After the 1st one, she got very sick and sensitive, could not really walk almost at all, and didn’t let us touch the side which was spiked. She also had a diarrhea bomb the night after the vaccination. I wonder what will happen tonight…