Rocky and Ellie are really bonding. They are like the cool older brother and the annoying younger sister. No matter what he's doing, Ellie likes to go up to Rocky and start licking and pawing at his face. Rocky growls like he's angry, but he just lets her do it. Sometimes for over 10 minutes at a time. And this happens several times a day. I tried to get a video of it, but Ellie stopped as soon as she heard the beep of my phone. This is the guilty face:
Duffy is really fitting in as well. He's playing more with Rocky, and he's cuddling up with the rest of us on the couch now. I'm pretty sure he's housebroken, but I want to wait until next week to confirm. He is getting better at crate training too. He's still not happy about going in, but he doesn't fight as much. And I've been able to move his food dish inside the crate in the morning, so I think he's starting to understand that it's not a punishment to be in there. He is silent all night too while he's in there.
I decided to take the dogs out for a walk today, because it was pretty nice out. A little rainy, but relatively warm for a mid-December day. I'm not crazy, so I broke them up into pairs. Rocky and Hardy have obviously been out on walks in the past, so I wanted to pair them up with Ellie and Duffy, assuming I would have one well behaved dog and one potentially not well behaved dog at a time. Then I also decided to do a big dog with a small dog. So my first walk was Rocky and Ellie. We got 2 houses down, where my neighbor was out cleaning off his driveway. And we stopped to chat. Rocky did so well. Not a single growl or bark. Rocky even went so far as to sit next to my neighbor! It was quite amazing to see. After we left there, it quickly became apparent that these two were not a good walking match. They would walk in circles around me, Rocky would try to jump up on me, Ellie wanted to be under my feet. We went about 1 city block total before I had enough and turned us around. Then I took out Hardy and Duffy. If that wasn't the easiest walk I've ever been on. Duffy is obviously leash trained. He walked on my left side the whole time and he didn't pull on the leash (but he did walk at the end of it most of the time). Whenever a car would approach, he would willingly move off to the shoulder with me without a fight. We ended up walking about a mile down the road and back. I could tell he was getting tired by the end, but he didn't complain or stop at all. Neither did Hardy, which surprised me. Because in the past when we've gone that far, I've usually ended up carrying him back most of the way.
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