Nightmare walking is back to haunt me…

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 12:13 pm

Yesterday after lunch I called Charlotte, Taggie’s owner, and asked if she would like to take her dog out for a walk with us. She said yes and would meet us in the wood. Pepper and I played fetch the Frisbee for a while before Taggie and Charlotte arrived. Once he saw Taggie, Frisbee and I meant nothing to him. All he wanted was to play with Taggie. She barked and snapped at Pepper every time he came close to her. Pepper is now taller and bigger than Taggie. He tried to put his paw on her back all the time. Taggie was wearing the shirt I bought for her last year, so her shirt was a bit muddy because of Pepper’s paw. She ran away and of course he thought she wanted to play. Who said dogs can communicate? Everyone who saw that would know that Taggie does not like Pepper and tried to tell him to get loss but he thought she wanted to play “Catch-me-if-you-can”. I noticed that Taggie growled and barked at Pepper with one tone and she barked at either me or Charlotte with a different tone. To me it sounded like “Get away from me the black horror!!” and then “Mummy or Aum, please do something to help me”. We could not walk them both too far because Pepper did not leave Taggie alone for one second which made Taggie barked all the time. I really hope they could get on so Charlotte and I could have some chats while walking the dogs.

At about 3:40 pm when he woke up, I decided to give him a small visit to the wood. I did not plan to go for a long walk. When we were at the drive he started to pull me so I turned back to the house and left him in the porch for a few minutes. I did not think he would get the message yet so I did not take the Frisbee with me because I thought I had to go back again but he did not pull at all so I could not go back to get the Frisbee which was a big mistake. About that time there were so many distractions going on in the wood, school kids walked home, other dogs and the most annoying thing was a group of teenage boys with an off-road motorbike.

I let Pepper off the leash to do his business before those boys arrived in the wood. There was also a female dog came with her owner which Pepper seemed to be attracted. He did not come to me at all but I thought about walking away from him and hope he could come back to me but because of that motorbike I could not left him like that. Once I got hold of Pepper, of course with a little help from that female dog’s owner, I walked him straight back to the house and left him in the porch to think about his disobedience for 10 minutes. I then let him come back to the dinning room but I did not speak to him at all. He looked totally guilty and tried so hard to talk to me. He came to sit under my desk and tried to use his nose to gently poke my legs. I took my legs away from him and gave him a cold look. He looked back for a minute and lied down at my feet. I went to the kitchen and sat on the floor. He came to sit next to me but I moved away. He tried to lick my face but I turned my face away. So he came to sit on the other side. Then he went to his crate and looked at me from the bars for about 1-2 minutes. Then he came back and sat next to me again. This time I gave him a hug and he was so happy and licked me all over the face. I forgave him since he seemed to know that he did something wrong. I did not think he knew what he did wrong.