She's definitely more of an alpha female than she showed us when we picked her from her litter. She has our 2 year old Boston Terrier absolutely terrified, and over the weekend while visiting relatives, she bullied a male lab pup who was a week older than her without mercy.
I'm using Richard Wolter's outstanding guides on training working dogs. At 8 weeks plus 2 days, she's sitting on command 85% of the time, and has been doing very short, 3-5 feet retrieves with probably 99% success. I've introduced her to water, in the form of a shallow creek behind JR's house, and she's finally accepting her confinement in her crate without endless crying and whining. Wolter's work was revolutionary 30 years ago or so, and it continues to be the standard. Long story short, bring the pup into your family as early as possible, and give the pup lots and lots of love and attention. For the next 3+ weeks, she'll be in what Wolters calls "pre school", with lots of learning involved revolving around the basic commands you'll use later. Very little discipline is involved, other than with the pup learning what "NO" means - but right now it's all fun and games. At 12 weeks, "school" starts for real with actual consequences for bad behavior and when the real learning starts.
I think next week we'll work on sit/stay and get her back into some deeper water where she'll have to actually swim, rather than just wallow around in it!
And of course, what would a talk about a puppy be without a picture??
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