Living with Lily
Anyone for a swim, my own personal pool!!
Aged 4 months. Lily loved water when she was little, she runs a mile now at the sight of the hose.
As Lily was growing up she had some very funny habits. One that always made us laugh was when she would go digging in her water bowl and ended up looking like a drowned rat. She would dig so vigorously as if she were digging for gold until her water bowl were emptied. We have never found out what she was digging for but that is how she ended up with her own paddling pool.
Now, as a big girl though she's not too keen on getting wet and really dislikes the hosepipe. You only have to go near the outside tap and she runs and hides. This reaction to the hose however has provided a solution to one of her most annoying habits. She has eventually stopped barking at the fence every time somebody walks past our garden with a very stern 'No barking' from me and a little squirt from a child's water pistol. One day of perseverence at the beginning of the summer holidays every time she barked and now she only needs to see the water pistol and changes her mind. It has been a great deterrent for her nuisance barking.
What a little champ.
In the Garden aged 4 months.
Lily sometimes, but not so often now she is growing up has a mad half hour where she runs roundand round the house, behind furniture, up stairs, scooting about closely followed by Abbie the l7 year old border collie, deaf and partially sighted and who has terrible trouble keeping up. Being that bit bigger she isn't able to squeeze into some of the gaps. Abbie comes to a halt as Lily squeezes through the gap between the sofa and chair and watches curiously waiting for her to come back out whilst Lily reappears somewhere else and then normally proceeds to hang onto Abbie's tail and especially when she was younger would give it a big tug.
Sadly we lost Abbie on 7th November, 2007. She had a long and very loved and fulfilled life and we will miss her greatly.
Lily was quite difficult to train because she has never been very fussed about food or treats and so much of her training has had to be done with praise and positive reinforcement with the ignoring of bad behaviour. She has learnt basic commands, SIT, DOWN, STAY, BED, COME, and she will give her paw. She learnt all these fairly quickly and easily along with some other very basic commands. She walks lovely on her lead and loves to run about on her lead extension. At eighteen months she is a fairly well behaved little girl BUT it has been quite hard work and particularly difficult when trying to train her off the lead outside her home environment. She is easily distracted when she is out and will not always obey even though she knows the rules. If I am feeling confident to take her lead off and she sees another dog or a person in the distance before I do, she sees RED and I end up like 'THE WILD WOMAN OF BORNEO' trying to catch her. She wont respond to me or come back and it doesn't stop there because once she approaches the person or dog she wants to play and circles round and round them until eventually I manage to catch her collar and put her lead back on. Once I was so embarrassed when she did this it seemed I was chasing her round a round this poor woman for ages. The woman had eventually picked her own dog up but this didn't make the slightest bit of difference to Lily's game and round and round the poor woman she continued to go with me in tow. When I eventually managed to catch Lily I took her straight home and abandoned the wak altogether. Thankfully we haven't seen the woman again. Perhaps she changed her route.
Lily has a favourite game where she plays with two toys at once. She chooses one which she holds in her mouth and another one which is normally a ball or something that she rolls around the floor using her paws to pat and dribble it like a cat playing with a toy. All the time she does this she continues to hold the other toy in her mouth while making grrring.... noises.
UPDATE FEB 2008
She is to be a Mum in early March 2008. We are very excited to be having our first litter of puppies.
I have been thinking about showing one of my westies and have attended several open and championship dog shows without the dogs to try and find out how I go about becoming involved with this. My first big lesson is that I have found out that show westies need to be hand stripped not clipped.
Grooming Lily - Changing from clipping to hand stripping.
These four photos of Lily are taken in the early days. The first two pictures are when she was being clipped by her groomer and the second two are after I had begun learning how to hand strip and trim.
