Growing Like a Weed

The dog that is.

As of today, Omar, my Spinone Italiano dog, is 11 weeks old. Growing like a weed. He has to duck to go under the chairs in the kitchen now.

And long legs from hell. I am firmly of the belief that he will be at least 90 pounds when full grown.

I have some frustrations with the training. He is figuring out the "come" command alright, as long we are not in the main house yard-there are too many smells to investigate (mostly cat crap that he proceeds to try and eat). However, we head out to a pasture and he listens well there.

Basic obedience is going well. Since I brought him home, he has only had 5 mistakes in the house-pretty much all of which were my fault for failing to pay attention. But he sleeps basically through the night-into the kennel about 11:00pm and ready to go out again about 6:00am. When we are in the house, if he needs to go out he heads for the door. When I get his attention, he will sit basically on command, and is doing very well with the "down" command to lay down.

The other thing that has me confident is so far, Omar has shown no signs of being gun shy. On the 4th of July when we went to Wil and Red's for the 5-B party, there were some fireworks being set off in the yard and they didn't phase him at all, except the one set of like 12 screamers - the kind that as soon as they come out of the tube they have a high-pitched screaming sound. Those bothered Omar, but they rest didn't seem to matter. This past weekend I started introducing him to the blank gun. I started out being very cautious how close to him I was when I fired, but he never noticed. So I got progressively closer. Tonight, I fired several blanks withing about 6-8' and it didn't bother him, never even flinched. THAT is good news.

The frustration right now, is trying to get him to "heel." Being a puppy, he likes to wander and explore and when I try to get him to heel, he tends to hang back or try to run ahead. When he tries to run ahead he ends up pulling on the leash and starts to wheeze. But we will get there soon.



And because they want it, for the ladies here is a slightly grainy photo I took on my new phone.