Hannah the Dog: Pandemic Update

7am: We wake Hannah up (she's the cuddliest she'll be all day in the first three minutes she sees us), take her out for a quick walk around the block, 5-10 minutes of training, and then she gets whatever kibble is left of her designated kibble for breakfast.

For the rest of the morning, Hannah naps. She moves between a sunny spot in the mudroom and the living room where she can be with me.  

It's exhausting to be Hannah.

Sometime between 11am and 4pm, Hannah gets her long walk of the day. I aim for 45 to 60 minutes. This is probably the weirdest thing about pandemic living for Hannah since most of the time we'd have been at work during this period and her long walk would be later in the day. We frequently go to a little used park near our house and I let her run around in a field off-leash. Technically this is illegal and I keep a super close eye out and if anyone comes within eyesight, I recall Hannah to me and put her on a leash.  We also have been working on her leash skills on this walk because she's great at loose leash in our training sessions, but she's not great at applying those skills to actual walks with distractions like squirrels, other dogs, and bicycles.  

We've been working on polite leash manners while on stairs. We went up and down these stairs many times.

After her walk, she naps some more. At 6pm, we do another short training session of 5-10 minutes and give her dinner. Between 7:30 - 9:00pm, we go for another walk. This walk can be super brief if Hannah isn't enjoying it, particularly if the weather is cold or rainy, but it can also be another 45 minute one if she's living her best life. The last week or so has been unseasonably warm and Hannah has been really loving the after dark time.  

Just working on stay and come on the bridge!

Hannah still has some health woes. There's something wrong with her back end and we can't figure out what it is. I need to schedule her for an MRI, but it's nerve-wracking to think about putting her under sedation and it's super expensive.  In the meantime, we keep her active with lots of walks and training and limit her running and jumping.  

She's still a timid creature. I've been working on her touching her paw to things that she's scared of.  Last week, there were some black trash bags on the side of the road and she kept jumping away from them and acting like they were the most terrifying things on the planet. I touched them with my foot and asked her to touch them with her paw. She would not do this.  A guy came out of the garage and I told him that she was scared of the bags and he told me there was a deer carcass in them and she could probably smell them. YOU THINK?!  Poor dog.

In training I'm mostly working on strengthening basics - good leash manners and stay and come. I have added a tiny bit of "dance" - getting her to turn in circles, wind between my legs, walk between my legs. I like this because she has to pay attention to me, but it doesn't require her to jump.  I need to look up some videos and see how to get dogs to move to the left and right with you, which is my next goal for her.  

Hannah used to be terrified of the hula hoop. Now she can do two paws in, all four paws in with a sit (above), two paws out, walk around it in both directions, and step through it (I dream of a dog who can jump through the hoop, but since we don't want her jumping, I lift it a couple inches off the ground and she just walks through it).  She's just so good-natured and smart and I think we are the luckiest people in the world to have her.  11/10, would adopt Hannah all over again.