The Furminator

After reading about so many rave reviews about the Furminator, I bought one off of eBay. (That's where I found the best prices. It's not a cheap item.)

So I tried it out tonight. Loki's no longer blowing his coat, so there wasn't much anyways. But I still got much more undercoat fur with this than with his other brush. Yay!

One day I'll have his fur spun into yarn. It's really expensive, but one day, I'll have it done. Here's one site that does this.

Watch Dog

Loki makes a pretty good watch dog. He watches very intently. He's especially good at warning us about children.

Look at how seriously he takes his job!

Hey! Wait a minute here! He's sleeping on the job! What? I guess he doesn't make a very good watch dog after all. What a lazy pup!

Loki's growing up!

Look at how much my little baby boy has grown!

Here we are back in mid-April, when he was almost 3 months old. Aww... how I miss that little puppy face.

And here he is at 9.5 months old. Looking all grown up!

You can tell how much bigger he's gotten relative to that electrical outlet on the wall.

What is going on?

I must have jinxed myself for saying that Loki's perfectly potty trained.

We got back from grocery shopping today and then Loki just peed on the carpet right in front of us. I don't understand?!? His last accident was back in June!

He was let outside less than 3 hours ago and he normally can hold it for up to 8 hrs.

I don't get it. I feel like I have an entirely different dog!

The worst kind of destruction

So far, I've always said that Loki's not really destructive. He's never chewed up any of our shoes. All of our furniture is intact. He's only ever destroyed paper. Luckily, they were of no importance anyways. And he's chewed on our remote controls, which still work just fine. Thus, in light of the fact the he's been perfectly potty trained since the end of June and that he's not very destructive, we don't usually crate him at night.

This morning, I found the worst kind of destruction.

Very luckily for us, these cords were connected to the light switch, which was turned off. We're so very glad and lucky that Loki is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, he really does not understand that he did anything wrong. Don't you ever wish you could just talk to your dog?

Here's our hypothesis of why. Because we wanted to sleep in on Sunday, we prepared his breakfast the night before and put it in his exercise pen, where he always takes his meals. This way, all we had to do was open the bedroom door in the morning, he could go eat his breakfast, and we could go back to sleep.

Last night, we put him to bed with us in the bedroom as usual. But the problem was the he knew that there was food in his ex-pen. He whined the entire night and pawed at the door. I got up at 5am, thinking that maybe, just maybe, he had to go pee. But no, he bolted right for the food. He knew it was there. I brought him back to the bedroom, but he continued whining and scratching at the door until 7:30am (breakfast time). So our hypothesis is that he chewed up the cords out of frustration.

Having breakfast ready was a terrible idea that we won't ever try again. He's never even showed an inkling of an interest in any cords before, so it had to be this particular situation. I guess, it's back to no more sleeping in on the weekends for me.

Snuggles

Cutie pie all wrapped up.

Stealth puppy... beware.

Clean up!

Loki's very best command is clean up. This command means we have dropped some food on the floor and his job is to clean it up! Sometimes, it's really yummy food like beef. Sometimes, it's not so yummy food like celery.

When we first got Loki, we were very careful about what he ate. Now after some months have passed, we are less worrisome dog parents. As long as the food isn't on the "do not eat" list for dogs, Loki is allowed to eat anything. And anyways, dogs lived off of human leftovers and scraps for thousands of years.

We're thinking about using this clean up command as a more reliable recall for him. As with most Shibas, his response rate for come is pretty bad. In fact, come is starting to mean, ignore the humans.

So far, we only use clean up to mean clean up, not as a recall. But I think we might be able to turn it into a semi-reliable recall. I'll have to start practicing it outdoors where there are more distractions.