cars, guitars and dogs....

I was recently car shopping. I've always previously had great luck buying used cars, never got a lemon or a money pit, always dealt with honest and straightforward folks who were simply trying to sell their old cars. But this most recent experience was another story altogether - I saw a car with a big crack in the engine and a very bad weld trying to camouflage it, I saw cars leaking copious amounts of oil, and cars described as being in "mint" condition only to discover that they were dented up, and needing lots of $$$$ worth of work done to them to get them road worthy. And that was just one weekend! But it was enough to put me off looking for a used car via craigslist - a few days later I went to a car lot and got a car there. Having always had great luck buying via private sales, it's interesting that I was so quick to turn to a car lot. But here's the deal: I've had 5 cars in my entire life - and while each purchase was a good and positive experience for me, there just weren't enough of those to offset my weekend's worth of bad experiences. My faith was easily shattered because it was only built on 5 used car purchases.

Now compare that to something else I've invested money in over the years - guitars. I've likely owned anywhere from 75-100 guitars, always choosing to buy used to get more value for money. Of that number, I've bought a few that were duds, but did that stop me from buying another used guitar? Nope, not at all. Probably that's because I'd had so many successful purchases that I just chalked the bad ones up to experience, didn't get knocked out of my stride at all, and continued on my merry way.

Ok, now for the dog content: the same thing applies for socialization - you've got to pad your puppy with positive experiences, so much so that when the odd crummy one happens it doesn't knock your dog out of his stride, he just gets up, dusts himself off, and continues on his merry way! Sometimes folks will say that their dog was "around kids all the time" as a puppy, but there's a big difference between being "around" kids and having kids actively handling that puppy all over and it being a fun experience for the pup. Was the puppy around kids of all ages, or just the family's ten year old son and his similarly aged pals? Or take the example of the vet's office - our dogs generally only see the inside of a vet's office once a year for vaccines/check ups, so is it surprising that they don't tend to have very positive associations about the place? Compare that to the dog who's owner drops into the vet's with him regularly just to say hello and get treats from the staff. The yearly vaccine jabs will quite likely still be a less than joyful experience for the dog, but one that is potentially outweighed by the dog's accumulated previous learning of "This is the Place Where My Friend the Receptionist Gives Me Cookies...."

Moral of the story: when socializing your puppy, think about padding, nice, comfy, resilient padding, and as much of it as possible, so that stuff like "Big Needles at the Vet.." or "Small Loud Child Pulling My Tail...." bounces right off it.

Big news last week: Shelter dog Fred earned his CGC!!! How awesome is that?! And not surprisingly, his stubby tail was wagging the whole time! We filmed the whole thing so we'll get some video of it up next week so folks can see our big happy fella showing off his skills! Well done and a huge thank you must go out to volunteer Debbie R., who devoted so much time to taking Fred through the CGC prep classes and also came to the shelter every day to go over his "homework" with him - cue cyber applause now!