Goose Update #2

 

 

Goose continues on in the shop, growing by leaps and bounds in size, and trying valiantly to catch up in training. He is sleeping through the night, and sniffing lots of very unappealing things on our walks, and working very hard on not eating everyone’s shoelaces and hoodie strings. Jon and I are doing this new dance where he’s rewarding me for doing shop work by allowing me to buy a new dog toy that Goose will promptly ignore in order to chew our clothes and cardboard boxes and then Jon gives me his LOOKTM.

 

Most of the time these days, I feel like I’m being constantly attacked by his razor sharp puppy teeth or he’s chasing the leaf being blown about by the wind or he’s about to pee or has already peed on the carpet or he’s gobbling up the cat food or he’s barking at two ladies wearing burqas on the sidewalk, which was possibly the most embarrassing moment of my life, and I have three children and had a chocolate lab so the bar is pretty high.

 

I continue to thrash about, drowning in one inch of water, as Goose’s “critical socialization period” comes to a close, hyper-analyzing every bark, every ear twitch. The amount of information out in the world about dog training, dog feeding, dogs in general, is staggering. Goose is not food-motivated, which has been a real hardship for me, reducing my ability to convince him to do anything to his own internal desire to do these things, which, you might guess, is basically nonexistent.

 

He’s doing okay. I am surviving. Highs and lows. Each very small achievement is a miracle, quickly undone by some other terrible anxiety cropping up. The other day, on the walk back home from the shop, he was rushed, rolled and pinned by an off leash dog with no owner and I completely froze. Goose’s trainer (my trainer) suggested I get a canister of compressed air to spray in these unleashed dogs’ faces, and I asked if that seemed a little extreme. She gave me a look that expressed the sentiment that it was not extreme enough.

 

A metaphor for life. I myself am a human not extreme enough to survive this. But possibly the dog will. He’s actually the least delicate puppy I’ve ever met, not that I’ve met too many. At the very least, he’s a very dense potato, and every time I bring him to a puppy class I’m worried about how fragile these other dogs seem, cockapoos and pomerians seeming like mostly fluff and poof.

 

On the other hand, his best friend in his puppy class is a corgi who is also very floofy, and also a herding dog. You find your people in life.

 

 

 

 

 

Look at this handsome boy with that giant eye booger. Another metaphor for life somewhere.