A Good Dog

I haven't given a Charlie update in a while. She is about 10 months old now. She is very sweet and very submissive, a great combination when you have kids. She is also very much a "herder". She is a mix between a Border Collie and an Australian Shepherd mix (so she has some other things mixed in that we do not know.)  This is not so great when you have kids.

When the boys want to play in the backyard, they want Charlie inside. It turns out that little boys don't really like to be "herded".  Especially when it involves a hyper puppy that has sharp nails no matter how many times we file those suckers. She used to nip at their heels quite a bit, and we were able to mostly curb that. But she still chases and uses her paws to grab at their legs and heels.

I was getting pretty frustrated with her, so I decided to go and get a book from the library on understanding herding dogs and their instinctual tendencies. I found a book called "A Good Dog" by Jon Katz. It is a memoir of his years with a hyper, difficult to control border collie that liked to herd everything from school buses to UPS drivers. I was about halfway through the book, beginning to have some sympathy for the strong instincts that our Charlie must have and realizing that it is very difficult for an animal to learn to go against those instincts that are specifically bred into them. And then she went and did this...

I guess she decided that she did not want to be understood.