A Snow Day!

We recently had our first significant snowfall of the winter. We totaled around 12”/30cm which, because of strong gusting winds, created some “interesting” snow drifts! Continue reading

Adapting a Toyota for Ray!

I could write a small book covering our exploits with finding a suitable traveling spot in the SUV for Ray. In a nutshell however, my SUV is an early Toyota RAV4 and the obvious place (at least to us) was to put him in the very back. He made it extremely clear that the idea was not going to work so his place then became the rear passenger seat. Continue reading

Treats vs Loyalty?

When the three of us are out walking, Ray will often try and impact whatever route decisions need to be made and, in many cases, we let him. The walk is, after all, designed around his needs and if it wasn’t for Ray, would we be out walking this regularly? We do, however, sometimes have an agenda of our own which we fit in with Ray’s walk as best we can. Continue reading

Fetch – Round 2.

Those of you who read about my earlier totally futile and humiliating experiences of teaching Ray to “Fetch” (see Post “Ray … Fetch” November 26), may be interested to know that he has done it! Continue reading

Ray’s Skype Account!

In one of my earlier attempts at resolving Ray’s separation anxiety, I thought that it would be a distinct advantage to be able to monitor him while I was away. Technology came to my assistance in the form of Skype! Continue reading

Used dog!

Adopting a dog, as most of you would already know, opens up a whole additional aspect to your world. With Ray, our constant visits to the Oakville & Milton Humane Society and subsequent drawing from their expertise has been an education, and the contacts made invaluable. Continue reading

Ray-sitting!

The Town of Oakville has a very good symphony orchestra and, as we both enjoy classical music, we support them by subscribing to their annual concert series. The performances start in the Fall and go through to the Spring.

The 2013/2014 concert season presented us with a bit of a problem. Ray had relatively recently completed his heart worm treatment program and was now presenting us with some new challenges! During the treatment program, one of the key directives was to keep his heart rate as low as possible as this would increase his chances of surviving the treatment. For us this meant that we did not get him into any stressful situations, which therefore eliminated any work regarding his separation anxiety. Continue reading

Big Brown Eyes!

How could anybody not love this face?

2013 09 16 1 Continue reading

Just thinking!

Just thinking!

Ray is fascinating! One aspect that I find admirable, and so many of us could learn from it, is the ability to see a positive in pretty much anything. Ray responded really well to “clicker” training using treats as the motivator but my concern was how would he react when the treats were reduced? Continue reading

Just you and me!

After almost 2 years of living with Ray, I still reflect with a degree of sadness on what his previous life may have entailed. He was found with no collar; no license tag; no microchip, and he was neither reported missing nor claimed. Continue reading