The Honeymoon Is Over!

The reason you do a puppy camp for two weeks instead of one is because for the first week the puppy is on his best behavior.  Why, well, new house, new people.  The puppy is getting a feel for what the rules are, what he can do and can't do.

The second week, the puppy sort of unbuttons his pants and as Fred's mom used to say, "Gets loose."

Coach, almost an exact week to the day, unbuttoned his figurative pants and got loose in the bathroom of the Kriseman's house on Saturday.  Kerry sent me the photo below with the caption, "The one week honeymoon has passed." 

Shot of a bathroom with lots of toilet paper pieces strewn about the floor.

Coach loves his paper.  He also loves going in the trash and getting paper out of the trash: used kleenix, receipts, anything.  He steals napkins off laps. Fortunately, now that they see the behavior, the Kriseman's can try to work on correcting it.  We have been working on it, but puppy camp is all about having a different approach from a different family.  It may be that their approach is more effective and they can pass those techniques on to us to incorporate into our raising.

Coach is sitting on beige carpet with a very big wet spot beside him.  What is the wet spot?  Read on....

The other thing that Coach does when finished with dinner, is that he will pick up his dinner bowl and bring it to you.  I'm not sure if this means "I want some more" or "This is empty: Fill it back up!" or "Put this away now."  Since we have a HUGE water bowl that is big enough for 40 dogs, there is no way that he can do this with the water dish.....unless the water dish is small.  Do you see where I am going with this?

So, at work, where I have a small water dish, when he is done with the water dish, he will pick it up and dump it.  And if there is water in it, it goes everywhere!  Fortunately, in the photo above, that is not an "accident", but rather a water dish spill. Now when I am at work, I usually give him water and watch him drink and then pull up the water dish when I see him stop, but I forgot to mention that to Kerry.  He's done this behavior from day one and we haven't figured out how to get him to stop.  So any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.  This behavior would not be acceptable to have with a visually impaired person and it is something that we need focus on.

All in all, we are very grateful to our puppy campers!  They are working on issues and giving Coach exposures he hasn't had before.

Tomorrow: All about a new exposure for Coach!!