Socialization stall

"Hello....hello.... is anyone there?"

It has been a low key weekend. Angus is so good, so sweet, so eager to please that unless he starts misbehaving I will have to end this blog: There is nothing to report!  Unlike Rosie's puppyhood, he has not brought a dead mouse into the house to play with; he does not have regular wolverine tantrums; he had never dragged a tree branch five times bigger than he is up the stairs; he has never even tried to steal a stick of butter.

He is lying at my feet right now, having cheerfully surrendered one of my slippers, which he was attempting to eat, and is now chewing up a roll of paper that I gave him. He is so easy to please.

Walking the dogs separately takes a lot of time but temporarily solves the leash problem. Eventually, Angus will get leash training, and then I think we will have to do training for walking them together. But for now, separate walks, even if it means I spend most of my life walking dogs.

This morning Rosie got to go first, and we did a nice 2.5 mile loop up through the fireplace woods and then across the West Picnic Grounds in the park, where we ran into exactly one person: a man walking what appeared to be a gigantic Brittany. "That's exactly what she is," he said when I asked.

The dog looked just like Gus and Greta next door, except almost twice their size. Very friendly, and she and Rosie did a little play bow and race-around action (while on the leash, of course).

Gus and Greta, the Brittanys next door.

By the time we got home my face was frozen but the temperature had soared to 4 degrees above zero.

So off Angus and I went, around the lake. I hoped to run into people and make him sit and accept treats and get more sociable--he has developed a very bad habit of barking at people he sees waiting at the bus stop, and while I try to distract him from that I also understand it because in this big cold ice cube of a world, seeing another human being is definitely startling and rare.

And so it was down at the lake. Though the sun was pouring down and there was no wind and four degrees soared to six in the hour that we walked, we saw nobody. Nobody. Just the windswept snow and the frozen lake. There weren't even any ice fishermen out there today.

Finally, toward the end, we saw a couple of joggers, but you can't ask someone to stop running in order to pet a puppy. So I just made Angus sit and fed him treats (i.e., kibble) while the joggers thundered past in their neoprene masks.

It wasn't great socialization, but it was something.

As we left the lake, finally, finally, we saw a man with a dog heading our way.

"Can my puppy meet your dog?" I asked.

"What?" he said. He wasn't very friendly but his dog was--a lovely mottled grey and white cattle dog with striking blue eyes.

So the dogs met, and bowed, and sniffed, and raced in leashed circles, and then I tried to hand the man some kibble. "Would you like to give the puppy a treat?" I said. "I'm trying to socialize him."

"Ah, no thank you," the man said. And he and his dog walked on, and Angus and I went home.

Sleeping Beauty, apres walk.

I suppose I should have put him in the car and driven him to Petco or somewhere and had him meet people but jeez by the time I got home I'd been walking dogs for two hours and I had a lot of other things I needed to do, and besides Angus gets car sick, and in any case he wanted a nap.

I hope this cold snap eases by next weekend. I am embarrassed to admit that I am getting tired of the relentless, eternal frigid cold. And Angus needs to make some new friends.