I didn’t think there would be much to report today, as Chester is in daycare. I needed to go out for longer than he’s really comfortable with yet, not to mention I just needed a break. Although the problem with daycare is that you have bring him there, then go out to pick him up again.

He slept through the night no problem. When I took him out at 5:30 am, he wasn’t real anxious to come out of the crate, and curled up on the chair as I got his collar on him. I can probably wait a little longer tomorrow, although he did need to do his business pretty quickly.

We went back out after breakfast for about an hour. He didn’t cooperate much in his heeling training today, so we didn’t do too much. Then it was back inside for a snooze.

Just about the time I was going to get him in his crate to take him to daycare, he started to run around barking. He still doesn’t bark that much, usually only when he’s startled, so I was surprised. I decided to take him out, and lo and behold, there’s a puppy running around. The first test of our fence.

He was definitely acting protective of his “territory”, barking, growling, and stiffly wagging his tail. But once he got to sniff noises with the puppy (who was very cute and submissive, but no tags and I’ve no idea where he came from), he seemed to relax. We have welded wire fencing on the sides, and privacy fence on the back and front. I had no trouble getting him to go back inside and into his crate.

However, puppy showed up on our doorstep! And followed us into the garage! I had to go, but had visions of running over the darn puppy or having him trapped in our garage. So I just backed out very slowly, and when I saw that he was to the side of the driveway, I was able to close the garage door. The puppy was nowhere to be found when I got back home after some grocery shopping.

I tossed a toy mouse around for Gizmo when I got back. It was so nice to see him playing with such enthusiasm — he tolerates Chester, but he’s still not very happy about him. He is clearly happier when Chester isn’t here, and it makes me feel guilty to know that I’ve made him unhappy. I play with him everyday before I let Chester out, but once Chester’s out, it’s difficult to play with him. Chester wants any toy that he sees — and while he might leave it alone if I told him to, Gizmo would get upset just at my tone of voice. I yell at Simba, and Gizmo runs away!

This evening was our second fence-test. One of our neighbors ties up their dog on a very short lead in their backyard, occasionally, and he just barks the entire time. Today was one of those days. And the other neighbor was yelling at their dog a lot.

In fact, the human yelling “No!” seemed to really bother Chester, and he was barking and growling much more than usual. I had him come to me, and sit or down a few times, but then they’d yell at the dog again and he’d start barking again. Mostly I tried to ignore it, hoping that he’d get bored with the barking when it wasn’t getting a reaction, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I would have done a bit more training with him, but I didn’t have a lot of treats left. I wonder if he remembers the puppy from this morning, and he’s still trying to defend his territory?

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