Dogs.  You can love them, and they can drive you crazy.  You met the puppies briefly in the last blog post.  In December, the dogs were very bored.  They had been wanting to get the cats when the cats would sit on the hay bales to get away from the dogs herding them. The girls found a way to get up there.

One morning,  I got up, and low and behold, the dogs were on top of the hay bales.  They were on a roll of teasing each other and started chasing each other.  I was lucky they had just begun.  I tried not to laugh too much since I was videoing the whole thing.  Here is the link for you to watch the fiasco.  https://youtu.be/piOKTXdgq5c

I hope you enjoyed the vignette of our silly girls.  You can see why we love them.  The black one, Oakely, is our ADHD sweetie.  Annie just loves to tease her sister but is more teachable than Oakley.  I should have named Oakley after the bouncy, trouncy Tigger from Winnie the Pooh.  She just bounces all the time when we are around.   Or any time for that matter.  But we have a Tygger in our group already.  They are named after the famous folk sharpshooter Annie Oakely.

The girls were bought from Oklahoma and sadly enough had not had a human touch until they were six weeks old.  They were born in February 2015. We bought them at eight weeks old. It was a litter of 8.  Momma was a border collie and daddy was collie and blue heeler mix.  They were also the smaller of all of the puppies.  The males were twice the size of the girls. The only other female was cowering in the corner, so she was out.  BUT, we fell in love with them.  The first few nights I had them sleep with me in the recliner chair since they were so human love starved and in some way food starved.  So I became the alpha, as the Jurassic World, Chris Pratt, had said.  They love me and obey me, but are having to learn to help the man with the cattle in the future.  But a half trained puppy is a barbarian puppy…..  They are not allowed inside often just due to the fact they are going to be herders.  If I had my way, they would sleep with us in the bed!  Except WE probably wouldn’t get any sleep, we would be dead from being licked to death and bounced on. (I really should call my husband The Conductor, since that is what he was with the BNSF.  The farmer, or the man, doesn’t quite sound right…. even though he is a rancher now and I call myself a ranchette wife with the small amount of 240 acres we do have)

There will be more of the puppies and their antics and hopefully their training to be cattle dogs.  But first we have to have them spade to help their alpha aggressiveness diminish, especially to one another. They should not have been from the same litter and not both alpha females according to the animal behavioral trainer.  This has caused some behavioral issues toward one another.  I was hoping for one female to allow to have for breeding, but there are other dogs in the area, especially a Great White Pyrenees and we could not chance him breeding her since he is not penned up and they are not near two years old for safety and health sake.

 

 

Oakely
Annie
We can’t get up the stairs yet