I am glad I am an early riser, it has made it a bit easier having the puppies and trying to get them potty trained. They are smart and learn fairly quickly. The first two weeks were a bit tough on me, remembering to take them out every 30 minutes or so, there were a lot of accidents. They are doing well now, it is only an occasional accident when we are trying to get the door open now, and sometimes they go on the back porch first thing in the morning. They are practically inseparable, always playing together, sleeping together, eating together and even a lot of the time they will be side by side peeing together! Lol, they are bonded. When I have Gretchen in my lap and my husband will get Schotzie up in his...Gretchen will jump down and go jump in his lap to be with her.
My husband took them on their first walks with the big dogs and said they stayed up with them pretty well, he took them as far as the shooting range. A few days ago I was trying to get my tiller cleaned up and ready to use, it wouldn’t start and after multiple attempts I got frustrated and decided to take all the dogs for a walk to see for myself. I had only planned to walk them up to the shooting range, it is about a quarter of a mile up there...we ended up going to the back property line. All the dogs would be running and disappear from my sight, I could hear the big dogs crashing through the woods...then they would come running and get back on the trail ahead of me. I would call Gretchen and Schotzie and first one would come running...meet up with me and then run after the big dogs then the other, it was a repeated pattern. The big dogs leading the way and the little dogs hot on their trail, vearing off the trail after the big dogs and all of them would run back periodically to see what was taking me so long.
My dogs are protective of me, especially in the woods. If anything out of the ordinary happens, they will run to me and surround me, hair bristled up and growling at something I cannot see. They are all hunting breeds, and have excellent tracking ability. The puppies are too, I am not sure what they are...probably a mix, maybe Black Mouthed Cur and Plott Hound. They may not be huge dogs when fully grown, but they will be strong powerful dogs. At the moment they are a bit bigger than my Bengal cat and they don’t appear to be as heavy as they actually are. I am sure they have put on several pounds since we took them in. Plott Hounds were originally bred to hunt bear and hogs so with my Catahoula Cur being a hog dog, my Weimaraner and Lab more bird dogs, I think we have the spectrum covered for whatever may come into our woods. My Catahoula is a good tracker to begin with, when my neighbors lost their cow she was able to find her on our 20 acres of timber and heavy vines in very short order. She was a young dog that someone dropped off in the woods that we adopted, she had been hunting her food...I learned you don’t try and take her kills away early on. She is better now, but will still kill and gobble down a rabbit or squirrel pretty quickly. She drug a quarter of a rotting deer up to the house once, I am guessing someone shot it and it got away...it smelled awful and she was eating it fur and all, I didn’t want her to get sick and I walked up to her and told her no...tried to grab a leg to get it away from her. She didn’t bite me or anything, but she snarled and showed her teeth and gave me a warning bark. I left her alone with that nasty thing for awhile, when she finally decided to come in, she had to have a bath...and I made her stay outside awhile.
The puppies are learning to sit with treats, they know their names now too. Someone suggested putting a bell on the door for them to learn to ring it to go outside. They are still learning on that, but they will strike it on occasion when I take them out. I love having little puppies, they are such sweet loving animals. Puppy breath, puppy kisses, puppy hugs and sleeping puppies in your lap...soft puppy fur and those wiggles with excitement when they see you...I know they won’t stay small for long, so I will enjoy it while it lasts.
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