Kathleen's Blog

My walks with Misty are getting noticeably shorter.  Now, she starts to pant before we are even out of the driveway and, if we are lucky, she makes it to the edge of the neighborhood before we turn around. Once upon a time, an hour walk wasn’t enough to tucker her out. These days… 5 minutes out and 5 minutes back is about all she can do. But she wags her tail and although we move slower, she sure loves those walks.

Tonight I was out walking her and got to thinking about walks with her when she was a puppy.  I spent so much time trying to teach her to “behave” on the leash. I wanted her to heel on command and not go crazy when other dogs approached.  She was trained to walk on my left side and to not pull on the leash.  She waits for me to say “cross” before we cross the street (these days it is the hand signal since she can’t really hear …)

But of all those, her habit of pulling on the leash was the hard one to break her of doing. She wanted to run up ahead and she wanted to sprint from tree to tree.  Our walks were sometimes a tug-of-war.  We worked through it and she stopped pulling on the leash, but she would look back at me with this impatient glare as if to tell me to hurry up 🙂

Tonight, while we were walking… do you know what I wished for?  I wished she could pull on the leash… kind of funny how that works, huh.

Love, me