A few thoughts on things we’ve learned after one week of having Molly as part of the family:

  • Dogs are hairy! She definitely has a lot of excess hair that needs grooming, but she’s not quite trusting of us enough to allow much brushing. She’s totally cool with grabbing her skin and hand-removing excess hair, though, so at least it is cleaned up a bit. I think she’ll enjoy baths more than the brush, so hopefully that will help. We’re waiting to talk to the vet first though to find out  more.
  • String cheese is your friend. We took our first obedience class this week with Paws4Training, and they suggested string cheese as a great treat for training purposes (since they can taste without actually eating the whole thing), and for those rare cases when you need to bribe her to do something (i.e. get into crate)
    • We have noticed one caveat: Once you’ve used it as a treat, Molly does not like when you grab another string cheese for yourself - she wants it to be doggy-exclusive! Joelle ran into this last night.
  • She’s scared of most things, but getting a bit better for all of these, I think day-day. It is going to be a long haul, though:
    • Men (she’s more okay with women it seems) - she’s okay with me though
    • Major roads (Queen Anne Ave, etc…)
    • Big buildings
    • going into anywhere - the pet store freaked her out
    • large dogs - she likes to sniff, but submissive urinates as soon as she’s around them, especially if they are fluffy and white
    • buses and large vehicles
    • getting into her crate - she’s okay once she’s in there during the day, but man is she hard to convince to go in - treats or not (we’re getting a daily dog walker, by the way - a local middle schooler is looking for work and is great with her dog - Molly and her get along, for everything but getting into the crate)
  • She eats all up pretty darn quickly. We’ve been researching food quality guides - here’s a good link to a good grading system (similar reviews on other sites as well): http://www.thepetpedia.com/article_view.php?articleid=6
    • Water she’s not so quick on. We need to figure out how to trick her into drinking a bit more.
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