Week 12

Every day gets harder to go to work knowing that your missing out on some reat times with the little fella.

He is growing well and we havent had any issues with him really. The Housetraining is going well. There are of course accidents every now and again but we are getting the hang of when he needs to go outside.

Though there are times when he goes a little nuts and jumps on the bed and marks the pillows as his...those are annoying at best. Or when he marks his bed and his cot. That too is annoying, the hard thing his that we never seem to catch him in the act, when we do we are - naively - caught of guard and give out a Noooooooo but to no avail.

We decided that we are definately going to take him Mantrailing and are looking for a Rescue Dog Organisation to Volunteer at to train him up. My partner will be doing that and I will wait and see how much time and what days are left over to try and get him into an agility course.

I have recently found out that Catahoulas are on the restricted list of Hunting Dogs. Meaning that you cant take Catahoulas hunting here. I will have to confirm that because that would be a serious downer! I can believe that the Catahoulas would be restricted based upon their Baying style but I sincerely hope not. Despite the fact that this breed is so rare that I would be very surprised to find that it has any rules for it. But we will see.

We are noticing that his stool is not solidifying at all. He remains very Diarrhea like in his movements. We are still softening his food so I am not all surprised. But it is something we are keeping an eye out for. But he does seem to be able to control it. At least to this date he does not go indoors, at worst he will get out on the balcony and go there. Well, to expand on that, there are 3 rooms he doesnt go into, thats the guest room, my office and the dining room. Of course, we do find little presents in my office periodically. But again nothing really out of the ordinary.

When he goes into the office, that is not part of his notion of home, neither is the balcony, he neither sleeps nor eats there so its free game.

Because Hudson is so dark we have bought him a bright orange harness. The day care centre demands one but I personally think that they are not very usefull unless the dog is working. Since the Harness is designed to allow the dog to pull it is much harder to teach a dog to heel on the line in my opinion. The reason for this is simple, if your arm is relaxed and hanging to your side the lead would continue down to the D ring on the harness or the collar. Now a connection to the collar means the dogs head is behind your toes, whereas the D ring on the harness is behind the shoulders of the dog, meaning his head is in front of you.

The position of the dogs head relativ to your body has a dramatic psychological impact on the walking dynamic. If the dogs head is behind you, he is following you, if his head is in front he is leading you. This might sound pretty simple to us, but to an instinctually reactive being like a dog, that does not think logically it makes a very big difference. Who is protecting who?

We went to the Puppy class outside of town and loved the playtime Hudson got with his litter brother and the other dogs.

This week we had all the dogs together, watching them play together was great fun. There was a little toddler playground set up in the middle of the enclosure made up of two small towers and a wall no more than 30cm/12" high. Now Hudson got to chasing a smaller but quicker pup, Hudson realised within one lap of the chase around the castle that he was never going to get anywhere like this, so he jumped over the wall and body checked his playmate. We thought it was great that he could strategise so quickly and adapt to the situation. Hudson not only used this shortcut when playing chase but also when a situation got too much for him, he would jump up out of the way and no other pup would attempt to get up after him. Naturally the other puppy parents thought the shortcut he took was funny and everyone laughed. Though the Class Teacher told us that we need to nip his Hunting Instincts in the bud otherwise we would have trouble.

I was somewhat surprised at her comment, and both my partner and I thought about it on the way home. Now he does want to go after children under the age of about 10(ish). Though from my experience that is nothing unusual, that has more to do with how kids run with their limbs flailing and screaming and laughing. That represents a prey behaviour that exites the hunting instincts in a dog. Since we dont have kids and there are very few in our social circle it will be hard to teach Hudson that Kids are a no go.

From what I know it is possible to teach dogs not to hunt certain animals, so I will get my backside into gear and learn how to teach Hudson that kids are of the menu.

We also got a chance to meet and chat with the Sires owner whilst at the puppy class, she is the owner of Aquim, Hudson litter brother. It was great to see that they both get up to the same stuff and that they are both developing really well. She is a Rescue Dog handler and trainer so her raport with Aquim is much better than ours, but in my, obviously, neutral opinion I think that both Catahoulas are leaps and bounds in front of the other pups that we have seen at the same age.

The physical development is different between the two brother though. Aquim is much more athletic and I believe also more agile, whereas Hudson is taller and more powerfully built. It is all early stages yet but it is a great and rare opportunity to see how they develop in comparison to eath other.

During feeding I have noticed that Hudson appears to have a protruding rib or something. It is something that I noted a little while ago and thought that it would definately be something I wanted to keep my eyes on. It doesnt interfere with his movement at all and he does not appear in any amount of discomfort. as it turns out is normal skeletal growth. Apparently the last rib does not have an anchor point, much like our ribcage, so that it can appear that the rib floats. So given that piece of mind I am happy.

Hudson has been going to the day care this week also, they all love him there (I am not sure how many puppies they have). I guess since he is loud when he plays and still has his puppy licence among other dogs he can still afford to be cheeky. The girls there have taken to him well and I believe that they have done some research on Catahoulas themselves. They have asked us about Treeing, but we have not really tried that out with him, but we explained what we knew. When we picked him up they where all amazed that Hudson could manipulate his claws like a cat! Now they tried really hard to convince me so I thought, let me look at this.

So I kept my eyes peeled and also checked his feet and toes out pretty good. Nope, no claw manipulation to be seen. What I did notice however was how he moves his feet altogether. When playing with something he does appear to "grasp" it as best he can. That does tend to expose a little bit more of the claw than normal, but I was surprised at how well he can grasp an item, I guess that helps when Treeing. I cant remember any of my other dogs having such agile digits to be honest.