Blondie 2.0: Barker Edition

Blondie was paid a visit on Friday by the lovely Brandi Barker (no joke), dog behaviorist extraordinaire. (On the almost nonexistent chance that anyone is reading this seeking information about a misbehaving dog and lives in the Westtown/Logan/Wicker/Bucktown area, I recommend Brandi completely and wholeheartedly. She's great!)

Brandi assessed Blondie's "lungy-barky" behavior and determined that he is "a very complicated guy." Acting out of some fear, some "correcting behavior," and "a high prey drive," Blondie has in the last three months or so increasingly lunged at strangers on our walks and behaved quite rudely to houseguests. Moreover, Blondie is an unusually stoic dog who gives very few signals about his feeeelings. In other words, he is a bad communicator.

But all this is soon to be a distant memory, we hope. Brandi advised us first to recondition Blondie so that he'll appeal to us in situations where he is frightened. In order to do this, we have to give him treats whenever a stranger approaches, no matter what he does! Brandi explains that we have to create a new baseline before we can train him to do anything, because right now he is just too afraid. I think of it as sort of like reformatting a corrupt hard drive. She also gave us a lot of pointers about training in general, plus a couple of new tricks to work on. We learned a ton, and it didn't cost any more than a visit to the vet.

So far, so good. The cold weather has made treat dispensing tricky, and we are experimenting with a few different strategies on that front, but Blondie is already doing well at some of his new tasks, like "touch" and "leave it." The jumping not so much, but we haven't even really started on that yet. I'm ready to be patient on that front. In the mean time, check out this article about other animals and their politicking social behaviors.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, dogs dressed up for Halloween

Chris and I were searching the internets the other night for some booties for Blondie. In this cold weather, his poor little paws freeze up. He'll be walking along fine, and then he'll suddenly become a tripawd. Poor guy! Here I am, wearing about 15 layers, and he's walking in bare feet! Who can blame him for being cold?

Anyway, along the hunt for the perfect dog shoe, we came across these:


And this:
And...





wait for it....








That's right, you can humiliate your dog for only $18.99! Oddly, most of the costumes sort of look like they've been photoshopped onto these dogs. I can't imagine why a dog wouldn't calmly acquiesce to wearing one of these things, considering they usually succumb so easily to that old blanket-over-the-head trick.

Between the Vader prosthetic limb technology and these, it's been a Star Wars-themed week.

monkey uses the force to make robot walk

omg