Sorry to keep going on about Labradors, but having the Lab pups just brought back a flood of memories about raising Keeway. My husband Kenny and I have been raising and training Labradors for almost 20 years. More accurately, I’ve been raising Labradors for 20 years, Kenny’s just been hanging around watching me raise Labradors. (No, I’m kidding, he helped) There are few breeds that are more challenging to train than Labs. First and foremost, they are incredibly intelligent dogs. They are also extremely playful, high energy, stubborn and deliberately mischievous. Playful is the operative word here. Everything in a Lab's life is about “playing a game”. Game playing is probably the most important thing in a Lab’s life. Everything for a Lab is a game. My husband made the mistake (once) of telling Keeway when he was a pup, “give me that!" with something he should not have had in his mouth, and then started chasing him around! What he should have done is picked up a dog toy, got Keeway excited about that and then replaced the human thing with the dog toy. Kenny is, as we say in Boston, “wicked smaaaahtt” – but (and I have to keep reminding myself of this - only in his world of computer science and medical stuff…I'm trying to be nice) ….but obviously not so much with dogs. WOOHOO, instantly, a new game called “gimme that” was born and forever etched into his Labrador brain. For Keeway, the “gimme that” game was simple, grab a human thing, run out and show them you have it in your mouth and wait for the fun to begin! 6 years later, we are still playing the “gimme that” game! The game is now formalized, we have rules. Human things are limited to plastic bottles and boxes, our part involves yelling (you guessed it) "Gimme that!" chasing, wrestling and tugging and then as soon as he begins tearing the bottle or box to shreds, a stop to the game. The game ends with “Uh, you’re making a mess”. And Keeway usually stops. (Remember the stubborn part?)
Let me continue with stubborn. One morning, my young Keeway discovered a cat, Good Heavens, a CAT, of all things, hiding in the bushes at the bottom of our stairs. Well, a couple of very loud barks later, that poor cat shot out of there and across the yard at full speed. Keeway didn’t want to chase the cat, he has a cat, he just didn’t want a strange cat in HIS bushes. Every single day for the next 4 years, (yes, FOUR YEARS!) when we got to the bottom of the stairs, a full, military-grade inspection of the bushes for cats was required. This involved full perimeter inspections, multiple random nose insertions into the bushes and of course crawling under the bushes for visual confirmation as the final step in the inspection. It didn’t matter if it was 10 below zero and there was a white-out blizzard, the bushes needed cat inspection and if it was worth doing, it was worth doing well! Stubborn? Oh yeah.
Mischievous? - that’s a whole separate post. Stay tuned…
