A New Man and A Very Good Girl

This week was a big week for us all around: Nala got her Canine Good Citizen Title and Grizzly finally figured out, after 2.5 years, how to lift his leg to mark on walks.

So you might laugh and wonder why I am excited that Grizz finally started to lift his leg and mark. Most people try and knock that behavior out early. Grizz has ALWAYS squatted to pee- which means he pees on his front feet… and then I have to clean him off. He tried to lift his leg maybe 3-4 times around 9mo-1.5 years old, but always fell over or lost his balance, so he wasn’t very confident in trying it and eventually just stopped trying. He grew up around male dogs who lifted their leg and so I think he saw them do it, tried it, failed, and decided he’d take the easy way out and just squat. I am hoping that this confidence in marking will turn to a confidence in the leg lifting peeing style so that I can stop wiping his legs off.

I am not sure what spurred this sudden change. I’ve been doing some reading and there is no concrete and consistent consensus as to why marking behavior can start later in life for some dogs. I even called my vet to make sure I shouldn’t be worried and he just laughed. After talking to a vet tech friend and a trainer friend, I did a little investigating outside of books and articles on marking and found, anecdotally, that many mature, neutered male dogs begin a marking behavior when introduced (directly or indirectly) to an intact male dog (or recently neutered male dog) who marks, or a bitch in heat who is marking. So I’m thinking we have a new dog in our neighborhood who walks this path daily like we do and Grizz is responding to that dog’s “signals.” Makes me wonder what sort of dog messages they are sending back and forth! But, lots of other people I’ve spoken to had a random start in marking behavior not brought on by anything specific. Just one day their dude decided to lift his leg and continued. But, here we are! Maybe this will reduce the amount of times a day I have to clean Grizzly’s front feet. Maybe not. Either way, he looks totally manly doing it, and Jack could not be more proud of our Sweet Bean.

Over the weekend, we headed to the Las Cruces Pet Expo. Nala loves events and so I brought her with me. When we got there, I decided on a whim to do her Canine Good Citizen test. I’d been wanting to do it for a long time- with Grizz being reactive, having the CGC as a goal for the other dog was my human feelz way of achieving some sort of balance/confidence that something was going right. Nala hadn’t taken a CGC class or anything. I was thinking about enrolling her in one, simply because our normal training doesn’t necessarily involve other people and so some of the “people” elements of the test are hard to practice on your own. But when we were at the Expo yesterday, I was reminded how good she is, so I decided to sign her up and give it a shot. If she didn’t pass, it would just show us what we needed practice. I was shaking as I signed the form! I was more nervous than she was. The wonderful thing about Nala is that she never knows the difference between practice and a test- to her, as long as mom is doing it too, thats all that matters. And so the test began 🙂

Canine Good Citizen Test Items

• Test 1: Accepting a friendly stranger+
• Test 2: Sitting politely for petting+
• Test 3: Appearance and grooming+
• Test 4: Out for a walk (walking on a loose lead)+
• Test 5: Walking through a crowd+
• Test 6: Sit and down on command and Staying in place+
• Test 7: Coming when called+
• Test 8: Reaction to another dog+
• Test 9: Reaction to distraction+
• Test 10: Supervised separation