Saturday, March 17, 2012

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture


Okay, obviously what's going on here is just a bad, blurred picture. But the longer you look at it, the weirder it gets -- the differently-sized legs, the different-colored eyes, the flattened ears with a ghost image of vertical ears, etc. -- so I was amused.

In other Sheba-related news, she caught a squirrel a couple weeks ago. I don't remember why I didn't write about it when it happened: I suspect it was just that I'd already written the Sheba/Nina picture post for the week.

I didn't see it happen, which I regret because I've seen her chase squirrels unsuccessfully so often and it would have been nice to join in her moment of triumph, but whatever. The husband convinced her to drop it almost immediately (which is weird, 'cause we can never convince her to drop the glowy ball -- on more than one occasion, she held on to it for more than 45 minutes before we could retrieve it1 -- and it seems like a squirrel would be way better than a ball), and later disposed of it.

Sheba has, so far, declined to comment.

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1 We would just let her carry it around as much as she likes, but 1) it was expensive, for a dog toy, and if destroyed would be a bigger deal to replace, and 2) the packaging said not to leave the dog unsupervised with the ball, which implies that it might hurt her if she ever did figure out how to tear it apart. So we throw it as long as she returns and drops it promptly, but if she starts to take longer to relinquish, then fun time is over. Occasionally I throw the ball one too many times, and then we wind up following her around the house for 45 minutes, waiting for her to drop the ball so we can grab it, wash it off, and put it away again. This is tedious enough that we don't break out the glowy ball that often, which if Sheba would only realize this and act accordingly, she'd get to play with the it way more than she does.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I need to take something from my dog and she doesn't want to give it up (although usually she's pretty good about it-to give her credit:)) I just get a dog biscuit and hold it up to her and say, "trade?" She's more than happy to give me whatever she has in exchange for the biscuit.

Really cool picture BTW!!

mr_subjunctive said...

Anonymous:

Yeah, Sheba will never trade for the glowy ball. Not even bread, which is like her favorite thing in the whole world.

(Second-favorite, I suppose, if she prefers the glowy ball.)

We tried again last night, and had some success trading the ball for chin scratches, though even that stopped working after a certain point.

CelticRose said...

At first glance I thought that was a Rottweiler instead of Sheba!

paivi said...

When I need to take something from my dog, I just pry it out of her jaws (if she won't trade for food, which she often does since by now she knows she's going to have to relinquish the toy anyway and if I have to resort to prying, then there's no food). I guess Sheba won't allow you to take the ball by force because of her background?

mr_subjunctive said...

paivi:

No, we can take it from her, usually, but she does fight it (swinging her head around, trying to walk away), plus if you're successful then you have a hand full of dog spit, so it's sort of unpleasant to do. Also it seemed like maybe it would encourage resource guarding behavior, though I suppose waiting until she sets it down and then snatching it away from her is pretty much the same thing, so that's perhaps less of a consideration.

El Gaucho said...

I'm seriously impressed that you got her to drop the squirrel. I'm pretty sure that two of my three pooches wouldn't drop it for anything in the world, being that they've spent two and five years (respectively) making all possible attempts to catch said squirrel.

Anonymous said...

Sheba's behaviour (swinging her head around, trying to walk away) sounds like play solicitation to me. She may *want* you to try to take it away. I have even seen a dog at the bark park lying on its back with a ball in its mouth, waiting for someone, dog or human, to try to take it away. I think for dogs play is by definition interactive. They are such social creatures.