26.12.10

morning run:
Alice
Lucy
Ginger
Gowron
Monkey
Floyd
(6)

Working with Floyd on the leash some more, so I didn't take too many. We did a little over 8k in stormy weather, via the standard southern route. I don't think the distance touched him at all - he could obviously have gone a lot farther. He was extremely good on the leash, and was on the whole time; I think he found it kind of comforting. I am convinced after running with him that he has a fairly serious deficiency with his vision. His reaction to things like birds and lizards and leaves that blow across the road is disorganized and surprised, and frequently does not track reality well; if you look at the other dogs and how they react, you can clearly see that they are in two different worlds. On the other hand, Floyd immediately grasped how to drink water out of the bottle without even seeing the other dogs do it, which is a first; they usually have to learn that. He did try to suck out of the wrong end of the bottle at one point, however, which also made me think maybe he can't see too well. He's not dumb, that's for sure. To work on the "sit" command I made him sit every time I gave him water, and he was doing much better by the end of the run. Everyone else had a famously good time, and the sisters were pretty good about keeping up... their group-mind is sometimes impossible to deal with, but today they were not so thick that way. Really brisk out, still drying out slowly (had a tiny bit of rain last night), no people or signs of them anywhere. They just chopped back a bunch of brush and small trees around the charco right at the start of the dead goat trail, so when you go past now it feels like you can see for kilometers to the north. Strange. It'll all grow back in six months.
GRADE: A