Growing up …
+ Chai went into heat on November 1st, at 9.5 months of age. Unlike Game, Chai keeps herself very clean – no need for diapers at all. She did very well only walking around on leash and not going to the park pre- and -post her meros días, since I’m still figuring those out for her. Several calm days in a row and she aced it!
Weekends were, of course, spent out and about in the middle of nowhere, hiking for hours, partly with dog friends. Fun fact: Chai and Kiba went into heat the same week. Gotta do everything together with your best puppy buddy I guess! I wonder if the two of them will outgrow each other or not. They don’t play as much as they used to because both of them have become less playful as they’ve matured, but they still seem like close friends when they’re together – just not two puppies anymore.
+ Ever since Chai’s heat, her interest in socializing with dogs who aren’t close friends has gone even further down. She’ll almost exclusively play with her friends and ignore other dogs. Little Border Collie, you have grown up so fast!
In other news …
+ Chai has now, through weekendly outings and strategic scatters (counterconditioning) learned that lone hikers are no more creepy than city crowds! No more barking when a person suddenly appears out of nowhere on a hike!
+ We have progressed from dragging a leash to being off leash on the sidewalks! Chai is being a superstar!
+ We’ve stuck to leaving the city for a day at least every second week … and are tempted to bump this up to weekly. It feels SO good to be in green spaces! Here’s Salazar (Mexico State) on a route Daniel and Dina showed us:
… and here’s goofing around with the phone camera:
Right as I am getting the hang of really using my phone’s camera … I‘m about to drown it in the ocean.
A road trip and Chai’s first time at the beach!
Chai went on her second-ever road trip, had her first hotel stay and saw the beach for the first time. Every one of these elements was a win:
+ No more throwing up in the car, even on long rides! No peeing or pooping in the car crate!
Lush, hot and humid: stops along the way, somewhere in Puebla state.
+ She generalized/I helped her generalize by strategically placing a pee pad the use-shower-as-toilet behavior to our hotel room! YAY!!!
+ Chai loves running along the ocean together with Game and took to it as if she’d done it all her life.
+ Chai off-leashed it in a mid-sized and a tiny Veracruz town and did VERY well seeing (but not chasing) cats, chickens and sheep and being neutral about every free-roaming dog we met. Superchai! There are not a lot of pictures because I drowned my phone in the Gulf of Mexico, but here’s two more:
Left: Nautla, Veracruz. Right: La Vigueta, Veracruz. We had A TON of fun at the beach in La Vigueta, but I drowned my phone the first time we went – sadly, no beach pictures or videos. We’ll just have to go back!