Wildlife

I encountered this bit of local fauna almost a year ago (late April, 2011). It's a sand viper. They are poisonous but not necessarily deadly. The birds got to this one and he was nearly dead by the time I crossed paths with him. They pecked his head with such accuracy that his skull was staved in and locking his lower jaw in place.

Sand viper. Grass for scale?

Close up view of his mangled head. The red streaks to the left are his blood. The birds, probably the Indian mynahs, clearly put a smackdown on this guy, who shouldn't have been out after sunrise anyway.

And I found this treasure right outside my patio gate just the other morning around 4:30 a.m. I've been told that these creatures are everywhere in the housing areas, and you might recall Harry's close encounter with one, but this is the first time I've spotted one so close to home.

The spot in the concrete at about 9 o'clock is the diameter of a dime. This guy is fairly hefty!

It's a wind scorpion, also known as a camel spider. You can count the legs and tell right away that it isn't a true spider, but it is clearly related! I completely addled it by taking these photos because its eye spots are on top of its head. It rambled around a bit, fell off a step into the grass, then hunkered down to recover.

Of course a post on wildlife wouldn't be complete without a couple of pictures of the dogs.

Harry is amazingly tolerant of the pesty puppy as long as she is calm. She's been doing some growing, but he still outweighs her! She's still nothing much but leg.

A sea of dog beds and blankets, perfect for a pack of sleepy dogs.

Back Home at Last

After leaving Bluff, Utah, at 6:30am and a marathon drive of 16 hours, we got home around 11pm on Monday night. I put 2,817 miles on the rental car! The dogs were troopers but I made sure I stopped every couple of hours to walk them.

heading home, northwestern New Mexico, December 29, 2008

Everyone is still recovering, taking lots of naps and generally lounging about.

I took Mimi and Gracie to class on Wednesday morning. They both were fabulous! Mimi was amazing as ever (my god, if we can get her past her fears, she is so precise and fast...), and Gracie, who hadn't done the dogwalk in a sequence yet, ran across it and hit her contact like it was second nature. She's going to be quite a little star, I think. I've set up a nice course in my training field that I can use for the next few days--it has all three contact obstacles, the chute, and two tunnels, and I added the weaves, the triple, and the table for grins.

The transition to the new year was uneventful. Mercifully, none of my neighbors felt compelled to blow things up to mark the occasion. The pack and I were all in bed last night by 10pm.

A tired dog is a good dog

Ever since I got my first smooth fox terrier (Harry Houdini), that phrase has been one of my mantras. These dogs may be small but they have incredible amounts of energy. Some people might describe them with pejorative terms such as "hyper." I prefer "high energy" or "really really active." But semantics aside, I will admit that it takes a lot of effort to get these dogs tired.

I spend at least an hour every evening trying to make my dogs tired and thus good. One of the best ways to do this is to play a very vigorous game of ball. But there's a slight catch. Isn't there always a catch?

For dogs bred to be kept in working pairs and packs, smooth fox terriers are insanely pack aggressive. I can only play with one at a time. Hey, I'm a pretty good dog trainer. I do agility and flyball with terriers. That alone should speak for itself. But I haven't had a lot of success in getting them to "honor" their pack members during play. People with more than one terrier know this as the "terrier code":

1) If I like it, it's mine.
2) If it's in my mouth, it's mine.
3) If I can take it from you, it's mine.
4) If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
5) If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6) If I'm chewing something up, all the pieces are mine.
7) If I saw it first, it's mine.
8) If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.

It is so much simpler to just pull them out one by one.

It doesn't matter if we play ball inside or out (it's really hot in north central Texas during the summer so we play in the house fairly often), the other dogs howl and scream in their crates the entire time. You'd think I was sticking them all with hot pokers or some other medieval torture device. No, it's much worse. I'm playing with a dog that isn't them. I get each dog out and throw the ball until they end up stretched out on the tile floor and refuse bring it back to me. Then it's in the crate and out comes the next one. It's a wonderful way to spend an hour with my pups.

Oh, and a tired dog is a happy dog.