Meet Alex

Meet Alex, the newest addition to our family. He’s a 2 year old Border Collie we adopted from the RSPCA shelter last week.

We’ve been talking about getting another dog for  a while and were looking at puppies again, but rescuing a dog seemed a much more sensible thing to do. Stephen’s wanted a new ‘toy’ for a while but I wasn’t so convinced. However, when we spotted a border collie at the Lonsdale shelter I agreed to go and meet him. The shelter required that we spend at least 30 minutes with Alex and that we introduced Kevin to him. Alex was a stray and very calm and a bit timid but on meeting Kevin just wanted to play. Too bad Kevin doesn’t play with other dog (yet).

We brought him home and for the first day he was an anxious mess. We went out to the shops and the gym for an hour and left him in the back yard. When we came home he was very excited to see us. So excited, in fact, that he puked all down the leg of Stephen’s jeans and wondered around the house for the next few hours struggling for breath and leaving little pukey-presents on the carpet when he got too excited.

Luckily he’s over that now. Slowly he’s coming out of his shell and we’ve been able to get to know him and start some basic training. Being a stray he didn’t even know his name. He’s also proven to be quite the escape artist. He managed to slip his collar yesterday and chase Kevin into the dam (Kevin has great recall so we let him swim at the end of his playtime). Luckily Stephen showed up and we could combine efforts to catch him. Today I was on my own so I took Kevin to the park for some ball-time and came home to drop Kev in the yard and grab Alex and he was off like the Flash, chasing a walker. The walker took the time to tell Alex to stop jumping but ignored me when I yelled out for him to heard Alex in my direction. 1Km later and back and forth across the main road to Willunga, several times, he finally decided that all he wanted to do was visit the Salopian Inn and then he’d come to me. Sigh. I was planning on taking him on that exact route for his walk. Instead I sprinted it. Nevermind, I gave him a big kiss for finally coming when I called him and we walked home together practicing loose leash walking.

Kevin and I practiced this on the way to the park too. Kevin caught on really quick and the usual drag to the park was really good.

I’ve gone over losts of other YouTube videos and my two favourite channel’s have to be Emily’s Kikopet channel and Zak George’s channel. Both have such fun attitudes to their dogs and the dogs can do some amazing things. I love Kikopet’s channel especially, as it show dogs which are stereotyped as ‘stupid’ doing heelwork and other dog sports. So if you think that your dog’s too old to learn new tricks. think again. Give some of Zak and Emiy’s videos a try.