Getting Out To The Woods

  Despite the misery of all the biting insects-the mosquitoes are plentiful and most of the time when you go outdoors you get immediately swarmed, along with a few gnats and biting flies mixed in (ARGH), we have started to take groups of dogs out to the woods to run around loose while we walk along.  We have separated them into two groups of 12 for now, one group of mostly girls-minus Lara, Cherry and Aspen.  We also added Billy to the female group because he seems to have it in for Clint, and then, of course, a group of mostly boys.  Obviously we know our dogs well and have to make allowances for personality clashes between certain dogs.  See, we know that Lara likes to "pick on" certain other females, but that she won't mess with males or with Cherry or Aspen we assume because they are larger than her or because they are getting older (like 11 or so) so maybe she doesn't see them as a threat.  We also know that Billy and Clint seem to despise each other (to the point that when Clint is in lead, Billy cannot be in point or first team because Clint will stop and there will be a fight), but Clint is very sociable with all the other males, so Billy gets to hang with the gals, which he seems to think is okay.  And oh yeah, Stimpy gets to go out with the ladies because he's an old man (like 15-16ish) and neutered so he gets to live it up.  In the end, making these switches evens up the group numbers, as well.
  Anyhow, we have started to take them out for exercise and are still working on a good schedule for it to get them all out as much as possible.  They get to go run and get all wet and muddy due to all the rain we've been getting while we walk along and get eaten alive by the bugs.  But it's a lot of fun to watch the dogs interact and get great exercise, so it's worth it for us.  We think this not only keeps them in a little better physical shape in preparation for our (hopefully) late August/early September training start, but it allows the young dogs to learn to articulate their bodies while they jump and run through the brush and trees, and it strengthens their pack mentality and closeness and they really seem to just work better in the teams together.

Girl group

 

Boys group.

We did learn a few things on our first walks this season.We had a group of relatively new dogs that we hadn't loose run before, so we called them "question marks".  We're always a little nervous when we have this situation because we don't really know what those dogs will do.  We've spent enough time splitting up fights and searching for missing dogs to know things can get frustrating, but we've never had any serious injuries and have never lost a dog for more than a couple hours.  This year, we had three pups (yearlings now) that hadn't loose run as adults and five newish dogs from other kennels and we didn't know if any of them had really done this before.  Well, we ended up having almost no real trouble at all.  The three pups all behaved and acted perfectly, running up ahead with the other dogs and coming back frequently to check on us. Billy and Lulu (father and daughter) we discovered are "Velcro dogs".  They never really leave your side or heels very much!  Nakiski was perfect and ran around with the other dogs, as did Clint, who blended perfectly and we suspect has probably done this before.  Mucho would NOT walk with us at all. She got as far as jumping out of the dog box, but wouldn't leave the vicinity of it.  After calling her and trying to entice her to come with us to no avail, we decided to just leave her and hoped she'd get curious and follow after a bit, but she never did.  She was in the dog box when we got back.  Frustrating because she didn't get any exercise at all!  So next walk, we are going to clip a leash on her and walk her that way until she realizes that it's a bunch of fun to come along with us!  All in all, we consider it a big success and will be doing this all summer this year.