We always get enthusiastic greetings from our guests when we meet them and our clients on walks around Fresh Pond. Depending on the level of enthusiasm, our regular clients reactions range from laughter to joking around to the effect of "Why don't you just take him home." For some clients that's a bit of a running joke. New clients generally express some level of amazement. "WOW, She's never greeted anyone like that!" All of our regular clients tell us, "I don't even leash him, he knows your house and he heads right for it."
One particularly icy winter day, we ran into Keeper (picture here and ALL the way down) and his owner. Keeper's owner is a wonderful charming lady so we often walk together. On this particular day, we headed up off the path through a little path in the woods to head back to the Urban Assault and Dog Transporter Vehicle.
Unfortunately, Keeper did the same thing. We tried to coax him back down, his owner called him, but Keeper had made up his mind that he was going with us and that was that! The path runs perpendicular to the reservoir path and as we got to the parking lot, there is a huge and now completely icy hill running back down to the reservoir. We tried one last time to get Keeper to go back down to his owner. Finally his owner shouted up to us, "Just bring him to your house and I'll pick him up." This seemed to be the only logical thing to do as Keeper had already hopped into the Jeep with the rest of the pack and had taken up a position in the front seat.
His owner lives in Watertown, so she was only a few minutes from our house. Keeper zoomed into the house and immediately found the remnants of a marrow bone that Keeway had chewed thoroughly the night before. Senor Keeper is a Puerto Rican rescue dog and one of the things you DON'T do with Puerto Rican rescues is attempt to take food away from them. When his owner arrived, Keeper was happily chewing on the old bone and we both laughed and said "So much for not rewarding bad behavior!"
Fortunately, Keeper didn't make a habit of this behavior and we both had a good laugh. Although Keeper did leave with the bone.
