Learning good and bad habits

Tuesday 21 - Monday 27 August 2012

Another big week for a little dog. He has met many new (almost exclusively female) admirers. Without fail, the doe-eyed, wagging tail approach melted hearts. One of his female visitors Victoria was the first to witness the slight slipping of the Bailey halo. Victoria was wearing  a long jersey skirt and the little boy clamped onto it and was swinging in mid-air by his teeth.

Ellie's legs make a good place to sleep

 This is part of a bigger problem emerging this week - nipping and play biting. His tiny teeth are like razors and he's not always using them gently. A good example of this is when we make efforts to curb his other naughty habit- digging. The garden now has 5 or 6 areas protected by bricks, roof tiles and pieces of laminate flooring to prevent further expansion of holes he has already excavated. If JCB could replicate the digging action of the fox terrier's front paws they would be quids in..

For both of the problems - nipping and digging - all of the experts seem to recommend distractions with a chew toy, ball or Frisbee to get him doing something else. This tactic is about 75% effective.

Whilst complaining about the cute, little ball of fluff, I would also add the jumping at and eating of flowers - poppies and cornflowers are the favourite.

To be completely fair to him, the nipping and digging do seem to have calmed down to some degree, and we have hardly any flowers left to eat.

Continuing on more positive notes, he is also making good progress in many aspects of his development. To combat the nipping and digging we are employing a short-term Ukrainian hand feeding regime. All meals are fed from the palm of my hand. His mouthing for this is unbelievably gentle and you can almost see bonding taking place. The purpose of this regime is to improve attention, dependency, concentration, loyalty and trainability. He is eating up all his meals currently 30g three times a day and loves chicken, mince and stewing beef.

Eating the lead is better than walking on it

His sit, stay and come training are all going really well. His lead work less consistent but improvements are slowly happening. He has been on his lead to 'the other world' of the front garden, very exciting to Bailey. 

He is sleeping well and regularly goes 7 hours through the night in his crate, in fact he often puts himself to bed. We use my old tshirts to supplement his bedding and provide a reassuring odour in there, not sure this would work for everyone.

A lot of the above 'problems' are, I think, associated with teething. All of his chew toys take a right mauling from those sharp little baby teeth. At 9/10 weeks he is already mock 'humping' some of his furry toys, to Jake's amusement. Neutering is looking more and more likely Bailey.

Surprisingly for a little furry fireball of energy, he is happy to let us comb and brush him including his tummy and throat areas, classic signals of accepting our dominance, so I read.

We are still almost obsessively taking him out at least hourly for toileting but a few accidents of the liquid variety still occur.

He has been sick once after a meal but them tried to eat it again, most to Jake's disgust. We suspect that an auxiliary diet of grass, earth, twigs and flowers didn't help. He had also been wormed that day and has been fine since.

He is starting to be quite protective of the family home - barking at children playing nearby, BBQs, lawn mowers in adjoining gardens. Although the cleaner can let herself in and he doesn't make a sound. Ellie doesn't think his bark is very manly yet.

In other news, Bailey already possesses more ball control than John Terry or Ashley Cole (in a footballing sense of course).

Thanks to Ellie, Bailey has his own Facebook page with 28 friends. His relationship status is described as 'it's complicated'.

In summary, there are far more positives than negatives and we are working on the latter anyway.  Above all and of far greater importance, we love our dog and he loves us. We just seem to be more of a family with him than without him. It's hard work but absolutely worth it.