Random Dog: Leo

Leo, named after Leopold "Butters" Stotch from South Park, is the only Pug I have ever met that I have actually liked.  He is somewhere from 7-8 months old, is in amazing shape and has an owner who is trying very hard to keep him healthy and fit.  Leo is a dog park semi-regular.

Leo and Conker get along very well.  Most of the time Leo or Conker is the smallest dog at the park.  Though Leo is a bit smaller than Conker the two are matched perfectly for playing since Conker tones down his intense play to match Leo's level.  Leo is very tolerant of other dogs too, even the slobbery Juneau who decorated his back when she first met him.

It's somewhat hard to see in this picture but Leo's back is completely wet.  Juneau will obsess over small dogs and follow them very closely often getting post-fetch drool on their backs.  Fortunatly for Leo neither he nor his owner cared.

Leo doesn't bear much resemblance to the pedigree Pug, probably because he came from a sub-par breeder. He is a light version of brindle, has a noticeable and functional muzzle, isn't shaped like a barrel (he has a chest and tuck!) his eyes don't bug-out and his tail isn't uber curled.  In my opinion, Leo is a better looking Pug than any pedigree Pug out there, not to mention he's a lot healthier.

All in all, Leo is a great dog.  He gets along with people and dogs well, is very loving and is fun to watch.

June 28th

In a couple days some relatives will be coming up from Arizona for the Fourth of July.

Hopefully, since they will be staying at our tiny house, the relatives will be willing to follow my rules with Conker.  There are going to be six additional people in the house: My grandparents and my uncle, aunt and their two kids.  Conker hasn't met any of these people yet.  He's been really good about strangers coming into the house lately but it's never been more than three people at a time. 
Grandma and Pop are getting here on Thursday, the other four on Sunday, I think. So it's not going to be everyone at once but in a period of four days, six new people will be in the house and won't go away for a while.  I hope Conker doesn't flip out.

Conker's birthday is drawing near.  He will be one year old in July.  I'm thinking of getting him a Cornish hen for his birthday meal and letting him eat as much of it as he wants, within reason. I imagine that something like that he would have no choice but to chew and would enjoy eating.
I also need to get him some more treats, I'm completely out.


Today Conker got:

Chicken meat, drum, heart and liver, lamb and pork scraps, beef kidney.

Dogs can be stupid.

I've discovered that Juneau can get along with other dogs!  If she is introduced to them slowly, off-leash, she will get along.  If she's kept on-leash or they come barreling up to her all bets are off.  I've been working with her for a while and she is good enough to take her to the dog park during slow hours when only a few other dogs are around.
She still has a few problems with smaller dogs, smaller than Conker, but for the most part she is doing quite well.  What she does with these smaller dogs is locks on with her Border Collie eyes and follows them really really closely and obsessively. Some of them don't like it and I often have to take her to the other side of the park, have her sit and try to distract her with a ball.  But once I can get her attention on the ball...

 That's all she sees.  She turns into a typical Border Collie with gottagettheball syndrome.  She will fetch until she collapses but I don't let her get to that point.  I will end the game and walk away and let her lay down and mouth the ball or lay her head on it. 

 

When asked if I can have the ball she will let me have it.  On a return if she drops the ball too far away I can tell her to pick it up and bring it closer.  A lot of the time she will put it right where I point.  Sometimes she will end the game before me and go and lay in the grass and mouth her ball.  And a funny thing is that once she picks a ball that is the only one she will play with.  There were eleven tennis balls at the dog park yesterday and she would only play with one.  If I threw another ball she would chase but not bring it back.  She would stop and sniff it then search frantically for her chosen ball, and if she couldn't find it she'd come back with a confused look on her face.  

Conker on the other hand, he fetches when he wants to, brings it back when he wants to, puts it where he wants to and will stop playing when he wants to.  He will also "hunt" Juneau (or any other dog for that matter) while they are returning the ball.  He will lay down and concentrate on the dog then rush and do his stupid Shiba growl thing at them and try to get them to drop the ball.  If they do he marches away all triumphantly.  If not, he tries again on the next return.

Juneau got fed up with this yesterday and growled, barked and attempted to correct him.  Conker took that as a personal insult against his righteous self and attacked.  And wouldn't stop.  Sometimes he is so stupid, he just doesn't know when to quit.  Juneau is two and a quarter times his size and easily put him on the ground.  Did that stop him?  No, that made it worse.  I puled Juneau off him and got her to stop.  He again kept trying to attack.  Not until after I shoved Conker away did he calm down a bit but still tried to get a bite on on Juneau.  

Funny thing was, even though he looked like he was trying real hard to rip her face off he was the one who got hurt.

I checked them both over real good and this was the only thing I could find.  And frankly, he deserved it.  He is such an ass sometimes.  I try not to let him do that stupid thing with dogs who are fetching since sometimes they can be possessive, but with Juneau he just wouldn't quit.  So he got leashed and after about ten minutes since he was still pretty riled up had to sit quietly by my side as Juneau fetched a couple more times. He didn't attempt to rush Juneau again, but I doubt he's given it up entirely.

Today Conker got:  Beef meat, liver and kidney, chicken heart, lamb scraps, turkey neck piece.

Foraging

Conker eats just about anything food-related.  He will eat dirt and mud, rotting stuff, leaves, fruit, select veggies, poop (the worse the brand the better), basically anything he can get his stupid mouth on.  The worst part?  He runs when I ask him what's up.  I don't even attempt to go after him most of the time, I just say his name or something and off he goes.  When he does that I know it's something he's not allowed to have, and he gulps it down as quickly as possible (even if I've got a tasty trade item) and it really pisses me off.
I don't think he realizes that I only get mad when he runs.  Stupid dog.

 Anyways, if I ate this kind of stuff every day:

 Beef meat, liver and kidney, lamb, turkey neck and heart.

I wouldn't touch anything else.  I'd be a snooty brat who didn't approve of anything but my regular food.  And that "regular" food is switched up every day so it's always different.  But no, Conker has to be a moron and eat stuff that's not good for him.

Oh, he also got egg soup today and is still foraging!

June 25th

Today Conker got: 

Bone-in chicken breast and a heart, beef liver and kidney, lamb scraps. 

For a bit there Conker was doing good with the chicken.  He was chewing off smaller bits but then he decided to be an idiot again and attempted to swallow it whole.  It was still a good size.  That's it for him, no more big chunks.  As soon as I can I'm buying a frickin meat grinder.

WHY

Why am I still awake?  This sucks real bad.  I was uber tired at 11pm but guess what?  After I did the bedtime routine and suddenly wasn't tired anymore.  That ALWAYS happens and it really sucks.
For some reason no matter when I get up or fall asleep, I don't actually get real sleep until the middle of the morning and early afternoon.  No matter what I do to try to "correct" this, it always fails and I'm back to being awake during the afternoon, evening, night and late night/early morning and sleeping the rest of the time.  WTF gives man.

And this guy doesn't help my problem one bit.

Look at him sleeping.  He sleeps all the time.  He's fallen asleep at the dog park.  He even sleeps through freakin thunderstorms!  Back in St. Louis when the tornado warning sirens were going off he woke up and trotted around the apartment going "Bruh bruh BRUH!"  For about ten minutes then guess what?  He fell asleep.  Lazy sleeping dog who's able to fall asleep wherever and whenever he wants. 

I'm starting to be convinced that I'm supposed to be nocturnal.  I am a desert creature after all.

Mid-afternoon walk

I decided to go for a walk in the middle of the afternoon today.  It was in the mid 70's, not too hot compared to recently, so I took Conker with me.  We stuck to the shade and went slow and he did fine.  We stopped in at the local petstore and picked up something for Juneau and Sasha.  It must have looked kinda funny to people as we walked by with this on my shoulder:

A fifteen pound bag of kibble is heavier than I initially thought.  That or I'm still horribly out of shape.  It wasn't hard, just awkward since the kibble moves around in the bag.  Conker kept looking back at me, probably wondering when the kibble was gonna fall and land on him.


When we got home I gave Conker a quick slicker brushing to get some loose fur off then looked at him as he lay on my bed.  I've slowly been noticing something but now it's really apparent.

Where did that gray ring of fur around Conker's neck come from?

When Conker was a little pupish he has a somewhat darker ring of gray fur around his neck. Wherever this gray undercoat was, black and black-tipped guard-hairs grew in.  When he blew his puppy coat it vanished beneath a thick carpet of white.  Now that the undercoat has lessened quite a bit, the darker ring is now very noticeable.  There are several other spots like this on Conker and I will try to get some photos of them next time I brush him (tomorrow).


Today Conker got:

Pork! With part of a chicken back and heart, beef liver and kidney, a piece of lamb and some crumbled sardine mush.

Random Picture

I told Conker he was dirty.  He did not agree.

June 23rd

 Today I cleaned a rug.  With a power washer.  The rug is now really fuzzy.


Today Conker got:

Chicken meat, back piece and heart, pork meat, beef liver and kidney and a turkey gizzard.

A long post about a pool day

Today the youngest siblings and a friend went swimming.  I took some pictures of them jumping in while Conker ran around the pool barking in an obnoxious high-pitched sound very similar to the uncanny scream his breed is capable of producing.
After a short while I got him to come over to me and sit in the shade for a few seconds so he could cool off.  It got to around 85 degrees today.  Nothing compared to yesterday's delightful 92 (seriously, it was awesome) but enough that Conker got hot rather quickly while he ran around barking at everybody.

Conker didn't like being restrained in the shade but it was for his own good.  It was either that or he would join the three monsters in the pool.  He didn't like that option so he stuck by me when I told him to.

(If you enlarge the picture and look just below my thumb joint you can see a scar I got from welding)

Conker decided just standing around getting scratched wasn't good enough so he began to play hand-wrestling.  A game where he tries to bite my hand and I try to hold his mouth shut.

(In this shot you can see my obnoxiously long thumbnail)

Around this time I noticed that Lindsey's friend didn't know how to jump off the diving board very well so I got up there and showed her.

Stand at the end, bend your knees and...

 Get the top of your head cut off by the photographer. 

Sorry, no shots of me jumping into the pool wearing sunglasses, a hat and SWAT boots.  I had work to do, and those boots take two days to dry.  (I know that from previous pool-jumpings while wearing them)  I'll see if I can get any next time I decide to not wear my boots for two days.

Fun fact!  I wear this "style" of clothing all the time.  I'm always seen with a hat, shades, guy clothes and boots or flip flops if I'm going barefoot.  (Flip flops are for inside buildings and the dog-park)

Conker decided chilling with me was boring so he ran into the bushes and began to dig a hole.

I don't know about your Shiba or other dog, but when Conker digs he gets super excited about it and gets this insane look on his face (that is extremely hard to take a picture of) and will digdigdig frantically then run around like a madman then digdigdig some more and so on.  It's really funny to watch.

Conker did get to have some actual fun while people were in the pool. The girlies were screwing around and trying to throw each other, Teddy and Conker were having a tug-of-war game over a kickboard.

Unfortunately Teddy was unable to pull Conker into the pool.

When I was growing up we were part of a pool club called the RONS Club.  Not "Ron" as in a dude's name, Retired Officers of the Naval Services RONS. It was founded by a bunch of retired Navy officers and that's where we spent out summers. Sometimes it would get to be about 120 out when we'd walk, barefoot, to the RONS and swim.  Then we moved to Peoria and built a hugass pool that is about four times the size of our current one.

While it all looked like fun, I'm generally glad I didn't join them.

Or they all might have tried to ride me instead of Lindsey.

Today Conker got: Pork meat with part of a turkey back and the usuals.