04Jan13: Shayna running and playing with “Little Man”
Shayna has a new boyfriend: “Little Man,” a beautiful (handsome!) 8 year old black Lab, whose family moved in a few doors down from us. She is crazy about him.
This morning, she didn’t want to do anything more than go out to do her business in the woods behind our place, and come home. This has been happening more of late, but she is still extremely active when we do our training, 2/3 times a day. (I just want to be clear, that she has her “up” days and “down” days, and I haven’t posted videos or pictures of her “down days,” yet.) Then, often she gets out of her rut and wants to go for our typically long walks through the woods.
But today, as we were exiting the woods, who should we see walking towards them, but “Little Man.”
Shayna stopped in her tracks, and looked up at me and said, with her eyes, “Dad, you know how I wanted to go home? Uh… nevermind…”
I know that, given her medical condition (hemangiosarcoma), I should not have let her run and play like this…and you can hear me keep saying, “Shayna, easy…” but I didn’t have the heart to really put a stop to this.
It’s a mistake I won’t make again, in the sense that next time she’ll at least be on the Flexi-Lead, so I can somewhat control her. But this one time, I let her go because she was in heaven, running and playing with him – something that, with the exception of Dakota (who doesn’t live here anymore), she hasn’t been able to do with another dog since Nov. 2002, because of her reactive aggression.
