Which feels like it ought to be the start of a joke, but its not.
His leash manners are finially getting to the point where I can walk him down the road and expect to be able to maintain reasonable control. Still not walking on a loose leash, or healing properly, or the like, but neither is he dashing off at every interesting smell and sight and attempting to pull me along. At 15 weeks of age I’m happy with that progress.
So I grabbed the 6ft leash (we use a 30ft leash in the yard, so we don’t have to follow him into snowbanks or mud puddles) and convinced him that the formerly off limits road was safe to walk on today. We didn’t do to badly. Made it down and around the corner past the psycotic female German Shepherd who’s only restrained by an efence and training (her mate wasn’t out today thankfully), with minimal stopping and staring. He figured out pretty quick that she wasn’t going to ACTUALLY come and get him even if she acted like it. He did have a minor freakout at the balloon tied to their mailbox, kid must be having a birthday party cause there was a bunch of cars in the drive, and with her having a snit I didn’t quite dare bring him over to inspect it closer, but after a minute or two he decided it wasn’t a sign of the apocalypse after all and kept going. Made it all the way down to the intersection with the next road before something (and I’ve no idea what, I THINK it was a fear reaction, but I’m not positive, and have no idea what caused it) caused him to whip around and head for home with all speed and determination. I finally managed to get him to stop and turned him around to look behind us, see nothing was chasing us, and we managed the rest of the walk home at a reasonable speed.
He’s currently sleeping it off while “guarding” the kitty door to the bedrooms (he’s sprawled such that they can’t get in or out of the door to get at their food or litter box) which means that one of them will decide he MUST be moved eventually. I’ll try to keep the video camera handy…..