I will no longer be updating Iron Guide (see below). Instead, I am now writing at my new, personal blog. Though that will be about some of the newer things I'm doing in life, if you want to see updates about Louie, Lester, and now Dusky, add me on Facebook -- there's enough ridiculously cute pictures to go around.

Lester is off his poop schedule. He'd had both his breakfast and lunch, but hasn't pooped after either. I've taken him out every hour according to his schedule, and he's peed every time but, even after circling around for five minutes (and eating, oh, a pound of leaves), he hasn't pooped. Dinner is coming up in just a bit and he hasn't even shown a desire to go poop. That means I'd put the odds of him having an accident in my bedroom at about 99:1. I'm watching him like a hawk.

For context, all our dogs -- puppies in training, working dogs in the field -- follow a rigorous eating and relieving schedule. Because these dogs go to all sorts of different places -- restaurants, offices, movies, airports, really pretty much anywhere and everywhere -- their handlers need to trust them to not have accidents in inappropriate places. The only real way of doing that is to have a very strict schedule for eating and relieving: they eat meals portioned out to exact amounts, they eat them at exact times, and they poop at roughly predictable times. That way, the handler knows the next time the dog will need to relieve and can take them out far earlier to minimize any chance of an accident.

Why don't they poop at exact times? Well, lots of reasons. A dog on a file-mile run is going to need to relieve far sooner than a dog who is just lounging around, even if they ate the same thing at the same time, for example. Again, it's complicated.

Sometimes, the handler knows better than the dog just how much the dog needs to poop. On a number of occasions, I've taken Louie or Lester out, give them the command to relieve, and they'll just immediately sit down and look up at me like, "Why are we standing out here? Why are you looking at me like that? I've got nothing." It might be cold, there might be some interesting person walking by, or, for that matter, some interesting leaf somewhere might have blowing in some interesting way. Except you know they've got to poop. So, you make them get up, make them walk around you in a circle, and hope that they get it out quickly.

Ah. The life of a dog. Eat, sleep, poop, play.

The life of a dog owner? Thinking dogs eating, sleeping, pooping, and playing.

Labels: Lester, Louie

Permalink | Written at 11:49 PM | Post a comment | 1 comments | Trackbacks

Great work.
Permalink   | Posted by  Maggie at November 10, 2008 12:24 PM