Poochie, my chocolate Miniature Pinscher, is probably around 1 year and 8 months old. The F.O.P Min Pin Rescue, as well as the vet both guesstimated that her birthday might be around 2/12/2008. She’s been with us for a little over a year and
Poochie is still a big chicken when it comes to certain things. Unless a family member is being harmed by someone, she’s all bark and no bite. Actually, no.. even when she’s upset about someone being smacked, or yelled at.. she’s still all bark and no bite. She avoids having to bite the attacker. She just barks, makes whiney raccoon like noises, and lunges and does warning snaps. She also likes to grab onto the hands and press them down. ADORABLE. She’s also an excellent alarm for any strangers that might be nearby. Of course, from time to time, that can be quite an annoyance… : )
Still, Poochie’s made tremendous improvements. She’s learned to ignore certain noises and she’s gotten much braver around loud noises and large, moving objects in our house. For instance, she doesn’t run like hell for safety when the vacuum cleaner’s turned out. Instead, she watches the person and machine (which always happens to be me) and stays close by. Once the vacuum’s turned off, she likes to go up to it and examine it. It’s adorable. Boxes are no longer as scary as they used to be. Rather, whenever my parents come home from Costco/Sam’s Club, she likes to poke her nose into the boxes as they’re being dragged in. Before, she used to just.. disappear into her crate or her bed. Right, that’s one big change. She’s gotten a lot nosier and is a PRO with the puppy-dog-eye routine. It doesn’t work on me, or my mom. My dad, on the other hand, is a whole other issue. I’ll write more about my dad in a future post.
She’s still a stubborn brat, from time to time, but she still shows a good amount of improvement each time we do our occasional training. For months, she liked to ignore my commands. It’s understandable when she does it while we’re outdoors, since there are soo many distractions. It isn’t like we go outside for hours on end. It’d be awesome if we could be outside all the time. She’d be much better socialized.
Socialization is still a huge challenge for us. I mean, I’ve been better about taking her out more and as often as I can to crowded gatherings, with different kinds of people and dogs. Still, it’s not often enough as I would like : / I’m iffy about dog parks since I don’t know how she’ll react and since I don’t like to trust others with their dogs. The last thing I’d want is for Poochie to get mauled by an unleashed dog, that probably should’ve been kept on-leash, etc. I know a few people with dogs, but I’m awful about getting in touch and setting up play dates.
This is getting kind of long.. and I don’t have any pictures ready to make the post seem more interesting, so I’m going to stop here.. for now. I also lost my train of thought.. Until next time!
