So we’ve had Arya for 3 months now, and she turned nine months old on Tuesday. I thought I’d do a happier update for a Friday afternoon.

In general, she is absolutely wonderful. She’s smart, sweet, and happy. She seems to be My Dog, and follows me from room to room. She loves playing with other dogs, frozen stuffed Kongs, and sleeping.

She think she loves the cat but she’s not entirely sure, due to him being a cat and therefore an asshole 50% of the time. Sometime he is very very nice to her and she gets excited and wants to play and then he flips a switch and smacks her around and hisses and leaves her very confused.

Her only real flaw is that she will. not. stay in a crate. She destroys them. See evidence below: she bites the bars of the door, pulls the bars off their cross-bracing, then either slithers through the hole (crate #1) or shakes the latches loose (crate #2).

Leaving her loose has not been without its flaws, either.

In fact, this week, the day after I got the call about Tristan’s new drama, I came home to find that Arya had knocked down an extra doorbell ringer and chewed it up a little bit. I couldn’t find the battery. She’d also eaten an entire bottle of dog breath mints. Cue an afternoon spent in the waiting room at the vet trying to slide into an appointment spot for an x-ray, and 30 minutes on the phone with a poison control hotline checking the ingredients of the breath mints.

She’s totally fine, and she charmed everyone at the vet office. We had a long conversation with a behaviorist on staff, who says we are doing everything we possibly can in regards to crate training, and she does not present as an anxious dog, just a smart and willful one.

So we are now considering options: keep puppy-proofing in succession, or start a from-scratch separation anxiety program of 4-6 weeks, during which time we’d board her during the day and work on counter-conditioning and positive reinforcement when we’re home with her. Decisions, decisions.

She loves the beach.

She loves my parents’ dog Willow.

And boy,

does she

love

sleeping.

Arya starts obedience classes this week, and one of my fond hopes is that she’ll become a well-behaved-enough dog to start coming to the barn regularly. It would make life easier and happier if I could just scoop her up after work and head to the barn with her, or bring her on weekends. Right now I feel rotten about crating her beyond when I’m actually at work, so I don’t have the heart to come home and then leave her again.

So, I ask: have you ever trained your dog to come to the barn? Have you had success with it? What strategies have you used? What skills/training tools are important to have?

I know that barns are often free zones for dogs, and my barn is welcoming to dogs as long as they’re well-behaved. I also know that Arya is only six months old and though sweet and smart, very puppy-ish. If she doesn’t have the chops to be a good barn dog, so be it, but I think she could handle it beautifully.

I did bring Arya by briefly last week just for a taste of it. She loved sniffing around, she ate one or two manure balls, and she was mildly curious and very wary of the horses. She mostly liked the BM’s dog (who is very large and solid and can be intimidating, plus has a loud pseudo-aggressive manner to new dogs). In all, I think it was a good success.

The barn manager’s dog has a command that sends him to sleep on the bench in the ring while she’s riding or working with horses. That would be ideal, I think. Hannah has provided some excellent suggestions for reading and training materials, especially in regards to the “place” command, which I think would adapt itself well to this.

I’m sorry! I’ve got nothin’. I have been doing interesting and exciting things, like some shopping at Everything Equine and a few rides on my horse in which I have once more been thrilled with the way the Pentosan is going. Tristan is now officially barefoot!

Today is Arya’s one week anniversary with us and she is so many wonderful things! She is also a capital-P-Puppy. When she’s not snoring on the couch she is bouncing off the walls. All of them. At warp speed. So between managing her, managing my job (yesterday’s “day off” was a 14 hour travel day…), and carving out time for my horse…I have zero mental energy left to blog right now. I keep writing posts in my head that somehow magically don’t appear on the internet. Get on that, Google!

Here, have a photo from this morning, how I found the boyfriend and the puppy after I got out of the shower. They were both sound asleep.