More Dog Park, Dog Sitting, and Baths

Sanders has had a fairly busy couple of weeks. To begin with, he's had a few more trips to the dog park, which of course he loves. During one of the trips, we ran across Dungy again, the golden retriever puppy that I posted about awhile back. Dungy had gotten quite a bit bigger than Sanders, but they seemed to recognize each other and played together a lot. He was with different people this time, I think they were his owners' cousins. THEN I took him to the park again about a week later and was talking to an older lady with a small white dog (West Highland Terrier?? Maybe?). Anyway, she was telling me that her niece has a puppy that she brings to the dog park, and it turns out it was Dungy. I swear he's getting to be as popular as Sanders. A video of these two can be found at the bottom of the post.

This past Sunday we went to the park again, and they had taken the fence down from around the pond at the east end of the park. YIKES!! There were dogs jumping in and out and out and in, shaking and throwing mud each and every time.
We were terrified Sanders would jump in there (or get knocked in), but thankfully for now he seems like he'd rather run circles around the water than go barreling in. We'll be sure to nurture that healthy fear-of-water trait in his personality.


Also, we spent all last week dogsitting for Jen's friend, Kim, who has a golden retriever named Valerie. So we were back and forth between our house and Kim's a lot, and Sanders spent a lot of time tussling around with Val, both inside and out, making sure that every inch of him was well covered with drool. Here is a picture from the first time Sanders and Valerie met. You can tell it was from back when Sanders had his little cast...awwwww......

The down side to all of the action with other dogs, is that it has been very muddy around here due to the snow melt and all the rain we've had. Sanders has therefore spent much of the past two weeks either 1) getting covered in mud, debris, and drool or 2) drying out from having been covered in mud, debris, and drool. So he's gotten a couple more baths, which he is starting to do pretty well at. He's getting especially good at drying off afterwards!

Oh, one more thing. We started last Tuesday night taking him to an obedience class in Anderson. The class is 5 weeks long and Sanders was ahead of the curve in week 1. We mostly wanted to do the class to make him better at listening even in loud, chaotic situations; and to get him better on a leash (i.e., not pulling out hard ahead of us). It does seem like it will be a good class for that.