Last April, we traveled to Reno and Atascadero to finish up Piper’s novice scent work title. This year, we’re living under a stay-at-home order due to the Coronavirus pandemic. My, how things have changed.
Ben and I are lucky enough to be able to work from home. We set up two separate offices and deemed Piper our office manager. We’ve had to file a few HR complaints about her for excessive physical affection in the workplace, but otherwise, working from home is going well.
Right now, I’m grateful for Piper’s temperament. She still has energy (she’s a 2 y/o Lab, so duh), but a quick walk and some indoor scent work activities are enough to get her wiggles out. We’re grieving the inevitable loss of the dock diving season, but using this time as an opportunity to strengthen her manners before we add a puppy to the pack. This also gives us time to make some lasting memories with Rylie, our almost-15-year-old medical miracle senior girl.
So long story short, COVID-19 suuuuuuuuucks, but we’re making the best out of the situation.
Last week, Ben and I loaded the girls into the car to take them to the park. I haven’t been working as much with Piper so she was dealing with some excess energy that needed to be burned off. A long game of fetch seemed like the perfect remedy.
When Ben was unloading Rylie (whose 14-year-old body needs to be carried into and out of the car), Piper bolted out of the door and into the street. Luckily there were no cars coming. This was reminder #1 that I’ve been slacking on training.
I put Pips right back in the car, made her wait, then let her back out the right way. Walked her down the hill to the bottom of the park, checked our surroundings, and let her off leash for a game of fetch. She bolted again, this time for an off-leash dog on the other side of the park. She completely ignored my recall, which she has NEVER done before. Thankfully, the German Shepherd was well-behaved and his owner was chill as I apologized profusely for my poorly behaved dog and my irresponsibility as a handler. Reminder #2 that there are consequences when you take obedience for granted.
This park trip could have turned out very bad (twice), but luckily it didn’t. I got a good reminder that even well-trained dogs can revert to bad behaviors when you don’t work consistently with them. Looks like we need to take a step back from performance events and get back to obedience basics. Lesson learned.
Side note: When we finally caught up to Pips and the Shepherd, his owner asked what kind of dogs the girls were. When I said “Labradors” he said “Oh, they’re really small.” I think I mumbled “They’re the English style” but it took all my willpower not to say “Nope, this is how they’re supposed to look.” Oh well…
One of my favorite things about this summer has been having my sister and her family around. My sister lives in Arkansas so I only get to see her and the gang about once a year. This year, we were lucky enough to have my sis and her three kiddos stay with us for two weeks.
I wasn’t quite sure how Piper would do with the youngsters. She’s been around our other nieces and nephew during visits, but we’ve kept those interactions short. Piper is, after all, 70 lbs of young Labrador energy.
Soooooo…how did it go?
Better than I could have hoped! Piper was SO gentle* with the kids, and they loved playing with her and bossing her around. My sister was initially hesitant about the newcomer (she’s extremely loyal to our calm 13-year-old Lab, Rylie), but Pips ended up winning her over in the end.
All four cousins had fun playing on the slip-n-slide. Uncle Ben may or may not have fractured two ribs while attempting to join them, but thems the breaks. Hehe. Sorry Ben, but I couldn’t help myself 😉
The kids also looooooved “training” Piper. We taught them Piper’s basic commands (wait, off, sit, down, stay, up, drop it) and they used them with gusto. I got more than a few chuckles out of 5 y/o Ken booming “ZWOP IT!” when playing fetch with Pips. She also was partial to leading Piper around by the collar for reasons known only to herself. 7 y/o Peej, a gentle soul, brought out the calmer side of Piper. She enjoyed sitting at his feet, stretching across his lap for belly rubs, and giving him soft kisses. He was the first one to develop a strong training voice, so he was the first one she obeyed consistently. Abs, who is almost 9 y/o, went a step above and used the advice in the book 101 Dog Tricks – Kids Edition to play some new games with Piper. Kid-in-a-box was my personal favorite:
It took Piper awhile to get used to sharing the couch, but she eventually figured it out. Or, I suppose, everyone finally decided to just share their seats with her 🙂
At the end of two weeks, it was hard to say goodbye.
We may have slacked a bit on Piper’s nosework training for these two weeks, but the socialization she got with her cousins was well worth it!
*The kids enjoyed making Piper jump on command, which is NOT a trick we encourage. As a result, they sustained a few chest and back scratches from over-exuberant “ZUMP”s.
Piper is the first well-bred dog we’ve owned, so the prospect of picking her registered name and call name was suuuuuuuper daunting. The only requirement from her breeder was to keep their kennel name (HySpire) as the first part of her registered name. There was no naming theme to the litter, but Judy from HySpire mentioned that we could look at the names of her sire (“Rapper” – GCH Hyspire Bohemian Rhapsody From Breckin) and dam (“Peri” – CH Ch Picadilly Hyspire Hidden Paradise) to see if we were inspired by anything there.
Since word play is totally my jam, Ben and I played around with legacy names for a few days. We scoured the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody and briefly considered HySpire Anyway The Wind Blows with the call name “Windy.” Meh. We loved HySpire Paradise RhapCity, but the only call name we could come up with was “Rose” (for Axl Rose) and that never sounded right. Boo.
So then we decided to reverse engineer the process and pick a call name first. After all, this is the name that we’re going to use every single day. We knew we weren’t going to breed the pup (she’s on a limited registration), and we weren’t currently active in any dog events, so her registered name was way less important.
So then I did what I always do when I can’t make a decision and I researched the heck out of call names. I found some good advice about picking something with two syllables and staying away from names that sound like commands. I knew from our 13 y/o Lab Rylie that traditional spellings (like Riley) are always better than cutesy ones (oops!). At the end of the process, I was most inspired by the article “How To Pick The Absolutely Perfect Name For Your Pup” by Lo Lankford at BarkPost. The advice “Name Based on Looks” combined with “Pick Something From Your Childhood” led to a clear winner: “Piper” – Hyspire the Charmed One.
Wait, what? Oh, I skipped a few steps there? Let me make the connection. Pips is a female black Lab, so we thought a witchy name would fit her well. I LOVED all things witches growing up, so Ben and I started going through the names of famous women accused of witchcraft. This was…um…a bit of a bummer, so we moved on to fictional witches which is where we struck paydirt. Watching episodes of the late 90’s TV show Charmed was my reward for making progress on my Masters thesis, and Piper Halliwell was my favorite of the three (eventually four) sisters, collectively referred to as “The Charmed Ones.” And that is how Piper got her call name and her registered name.
Fun fact: I found out later, while researching Piper’s 5-generation pedigree in more detail, that there was one bitch who was very accomplished in performance sports (as opposed to conformation, because everyone else in the line is uber-pretty). That bitch’s official name was SHR UACH GRCH Endeavor Piccadilly Pipe Dream JH NA NAJ RN WC CGC. What was her call name? You guessed it: Piper. If that’s not meant to be, I don’t know what is.
Today is Piper McPant’s very first birthday. Or, as our niece Evelynn explains it, she changes from being 0 years old to 1 year old.
I’d write that time flies, but often it crawls very very slowly when you’re raising a Lab puppy. From the potty training to the chewing to the barking to the jumping to the counter surfing, that first year is no walk in the park. Oh yeah, I forgot to include walking in the park on the list of challenges.
However, we know that the work we put in during the first year makes a huge impact on the adult Piper will become. So here’s to the sleepless nights, the ear drops, the gallons of ECOS, the holes in our Sanuks, the spots on the carpet, and the endless black hair. Here’s to the sweetest pupper we could imagine, and all the doggo adventures to come.
