Orion, the puppy, has seen his privileges increase a lot this past week, because he has mostly stopped trying to detach the rear legs from Lody, our elderly Collie. Considering how worried I was that she might hurt him when he joined our household, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time protecting a sixty pound Collie from a puppy less than one fourth her mass. Increased privileges means he is spending most of the daylight hours in the house rather than in his pen. When the weather is nice, we leave the door open between the house and the mudroom, and there is a dog door from the mudroom to the dog run.
I finally had to take all of the remaining plush toys and put them away. Lily, the Golden Retriever, kept stealing them and eviscerating them, producing a blizzard of plush toy guts. Not only did I object to the destructiveness, I didn’t want any of the dogs to swallow the guts and risk an impaction. The latex toys and rope toys seem less prone to destruction, though they do keep ending up outside in the dog run.
Lily’s favorite activity is to retrieve tennis balls. While she is doing so, Orion follows her back and forth with a ball in his mouth, and Lightning, the Sheltie, tries to get the ball before Lily so he can play keep away. Lody just watches, apparently impressed by the useless expenditure of all that energy.
