A Rosie update
She’s doing well! To be fair, the longest we’ve left her alone is 5 minutes to go get something downstairs, or to do laundry. And she’d bark for a few minutes until she gives up and stand by the door. It’s unclear how she would react to us being gone for longer.
She is well adjusted to her new walk schedule and poops and pees relatively quickly in the same spots. There are some dogs in the neighborhood she doesn’t like, obv the ones who look like her and small yappie dogs who bark at her first. Nothing new. There are days when she’s super eager to meet and play with dogs, and will lay down on the sidewalk for every dog she sees. And then tries to jump and play immediately. This scares the other owner and they yank their dog away, which really confuses Rosie and makes her bark more. It breaks my heart when this happens, so I usually tug her away, but that also breaks my heart a little when she keeps looking back at the other dogs.
There are some rude people in our building who don’t seem to like dogs. I understand being scared of dogs. But the current social distancing guidelines+500 unites sharing 3 small elevators means sometimes, they might have to share an elevator with me because I’ve already skipped 3 other full elevators in the past 15 minutes, and you’re the only other person in this one. But like actually, why the fuck can’t they use their words and ask nicely? So far I’ve gotten, “get that thing away from me to the other corner, please, it’s a courtesy, come on” (where there was another person standing) when Rosie wasn’t bothering them at all. Also, “I don’t ride with dogs,” and just about cursed me out when she thought I was ignoring her when I was just going over to press the button again to call another elevator - though I wish I just got on and told her to wait for the next one if she doesn’t want to ride. There was an old man who said “you go ahead, I don’t want to get in the elevator with that thing” even though he had been waiting first, so I let him know to please ask nicely next time, but I’m happy to wait for another. Then the dude didn’t press a button and the elevator got sent down again, WASTING EVERYONE’S TIME. I hate people.
We took her to the dog park nearby once, but it wasn’t much of a park. She didn’t feel very much herself there, and mostly just stood around. She tried to initiate play with some dogs, but they didn’t seem super interested. She gave up quickly. We did finally meet the 2 newfoundlands in the neighborhood off leash, where they were able to interact calmly. They look like giant bears. I was surprised to learn that one is still a puppy! He was enormous. They have interacted on walks before, but Rosie was coming on a little too strong. But after that, we’ve seen them on our walks and they were able to greet each other calmly.
She has been able to play with gramdog and grampdog in the suburbs though! There is a “no dogs allowed” park behind their yard, where everyone takes their dogs anyway, and we let her run on her 50ft leash back and forth between everyone and offered her treats. She is slowly getting better at recall. Once, we thought she would be able to run off leash with treats as an incentive. But after a few rounds, she’d get too excited and dart off, seemingly to never return. It almost gave us heart attacks, until we realized she was circling back toward the chicken on the grill in the backyard. At least the chicken anchored her, but we were lucky. So we’re never doing that again.
I do wish we had an indoor dog run for nights. There have been some reports of crime late at night. I wish I could take Rosie out at night with a sense of safety, but when it’s already getting dark and she still hasn’t pooped, it does make me feel a little uneasy. And then she senses that unease. And is even less willing to poop. Sigh.
That’s the Rosie update. She has yet to find a Lockland or a Helmut here to play with, but other than that she’s very content being home with mommy.