Yesterday's Got-ya day

I'm informed it is usually referred to as "gotcha day", but to me that seems like it has a connotation of entrapment. The cry of "gotcha" when a prank is successfully pulled, and so on. So I'm going to try to get away with saying "got-ya day", which to me is better (even though I acknowledge that technically "gotcha" is simply a sort of contraction of "got you"). Well, enough of that useless rumbling. Whatever you call it, Vallie's first one was yesterday. Valkyrie has been with us now for one year.

She's starting to get used to us, we think.

For her special anniversary dinner, Selena prepared her a lovely (as you can see) bowl of tripe, liver treats, cheesy (?) dog buiscuits, all served on a lovely bed of high quality kibble. Valkyrie slurped it up. Then she got a few cheezies tossed to her (but that'll be our little secret).

The special meal may also have been hopefully to serve as an apology for doing this to her earlier in the day...

Poor, Big Baby! A little too much partying for her. She doesn't seem to even care that she won first place in this "costume race" competition!

As chance would have it, on her anniversary, a local Greyhound group was having a fundraiser fair. We headed over. Valkyrie was really excited to meet up with many dozens of other greyhounds again. Much joyous sniffing. Only a few growls.

She also attempted to have her speed clocked: 23 km/h! Ha. How embarrassing. Alas, the speed measurement situation seemed a little less than scientific. The running area was small, the dogs barely able to get up to stride. The timing was done with some sort of smart phone app, which seemed a little more than finicky much of the time. And the only inducement to velocity was a tossed rubber squeaky toy combined with some energetic beckonings. Apparently not enough! Also, it was raining. But everyone had fun anyhow.

The "race" she won, the picture at the top of the post, consisted of all the dogs being given a similar pile of clothes. The winner was the one which could be dressed the fastest and then make it to the finish line with all clothes still on. We are so proud. Obviously.

There was also a tail length competition. Vallie endured only to find out her tail length was... average. Though her adoptive mom insists that average really means really spectacularly awesome for a relatively petite hound such as herself.

You may also notice the bandaged leg. Actually what you see is an old kids' sock with the end cut out, stylishly covering a bandage. It is due to a nasty cut that seemed to be the result of a collision at the off-lease dog park -- though we're not entirely sure what happened. We didn't notice it until we got home. But greyhounds are notoriously thin skinned -- literally in this instance -- and are easily injured. The wound, while somewhat gruesome looking, doesn't seem to bother her. She gets a new dressing on the leg every day until it starts healing up sufficiently.

Anyhow... that was our doggie day for our dog's day (click link for a few more pictures).

Happy one-year at your forever-home, Valkyrie!

The Brief and Wondrous Races of Valkyrie Puppers Big Baby Longnose

We finally got around to organizing the videos of the pupper's short racing career. It is nice that all this greyhound information is kept so meticulously online — even though it is all in the service of people placing bets on the more genetically lucky of the beasts. A strange thing.

So, our Valkyrie was whelped on July 26, 2012 as HL's Bev, descendant of Dave the Dog (no joke!) and JR B's Amy Lou. Both her ears are tattooed, testimony to her genetic status associated forever with a record of... undesirable positioning.

There are three classes of races in Valkyrie's history. Schooling races. M-class races, which Selena informs me are the lowest level races. And the A-class races, which are apparently the real thing.

Of the three schooling race videos of her we have she came in 7th, 6th, and 5th. In regular races there are 8 dogs in a race, however in the school races there may be any number. In fact in her school races there were 7, 6, and 6 dogs, respectively racing. Hey, she didn't finish entirely last in her last school race! Hurray! Here is her glorious best race ever (Valkyrie is wearing #7):


We have 4 of her M races. She finished 8th, 4th, 8th, and 8th. God only knows what happened on that second race. The glory of her career! Was that one freak non-loss what kept her in the game?

After the M races her history shows that she seems to have gone back to S races for a while. But we don't have videos for them, as they were at an other kennel which does not have videos available for school races. The stats are available, but not knowing how many dogs ran it's hard for us amateurs to know what the stats mean.

But apparently after that second school stint she went on into her career culminating 7 A races. Here's how she did: 8th, 6th, 8th, 8th, 7th, 8th, and 8th. Poor baby!

Here is the sad last race. In the rain no less. No wonder she doesn't like the rain. You will see she was just too polite a dog to win races. Another dog sticks it's bum in her face, and she is all like, "What? Oh? Okay, whatever..." and she moves over, and has the good sense to hang back and keep her distance from that point on.


We have a few of her early school races, though they have no sound.

Here are all of her video races, in chronological order, if you really want flatter her by watching them. And here are her stats at TrackInfo.

When I watch the videos it seems to me that she looks like she's actually often trying much harder than many of the other dogs. She seems to put so much effort into her running. Yet, to little avail. When we take her to the dog park and get her running there she also looks like kind spastic. She loves to run, and gets excited... and just seems to lose control, her wiry body going crazy all around her. A big baby goofball.

Anne's Adventure Picnic

So, Anne showed up last week and had this great idea that we should go for a picnic. So we did. Sort of. In the mid minus twenty degrees Celsius wind chill blizzard....


Well, to be honest, it turned out to be a bit cold. We decided maybe picnicking was a bit more than we could chew. So we relocated the food part of the picnic to the relative sanity of home.

In the video you can see Istra frozen to a sled being pulled. Valkyrie was pretty excited to be off-leash and bouncing around. Anne's little dog Moh runs back and forth. Up in the distance (there is a photo tacked onto the end of the video) you can see Emeth being pulled on his sled by Ivonka's big old dog Niko (with Ivonka mushing them on).

It may not have been the most picnicky picnic ever to be picnicked. But it was certianly an adventure... you never know what's going to happen when Aunty Anne shows up.

Dog days update...

It's been just over a week since then dog moved in.  We all continue our adjustments, but already much has changed...

A week plus a day later, Valkyrie  finally figured out how to utilize her fancy dog bed. That is, she figured out she could actually lie on it. Up until now, since she started venturing from her crate, she has insisted on lying down beside the thing. But now, having discovered the wonders of plushness, she is seldom found anywhere else other than curled up in the dog bed. If the fire is going, it's sometimes hard to coax her from her warm, comfy coma, even to go outside for a walk.

On her second day (Sunday) after the dog arrived (Friday), though still mostly staying in her crate, it seemed she was getting a bit more restless. We decided to take her to the pet store and see if there were some toys that might interest her. It was a new experience for everyone getting her into the back of the car with the back seats up and occupied (by the kids), but we all survived. And Valkyrie seemed to really like seeing and smelling other dogs at the pet store. "Hurray, there are still dogs in the world! I'm not exiled entirely into a human-only wasteland!" Partly due to this, we decided to check out a dog park nearby (Costco and the pet store) that Selena'd heard of. It was great -- big, big meadow with paths through it. It deserves, and probably will get, a post of its own in the future. Anyhow, we didn't let Valkyrie off leash, of course. But we walked around, and she happily met a bunch more dogs, including another greyhound who happened to be there.

The fox and the hound.

On the third day (Monday) after arriving, having still stayed in her crate (with open door) most of the time (as described in the previous post), Valkyrie finally started to get more used to things around here and venturing out to sniff around. After taking that huge step, she started to grow more confident. In fact, the pendulum has at times seems like it has swung too far to the opposite extreme! We almost long for the days where she wouldn't come out of her crate! (But not really.) It's been a bit like having a three year old wandering around, with teeth. She's been getting in to lots of things. Istra, again, has been especially outraged on two more occasions. One evening she was fooling around at dinner and left her place at the table, and the dog walked by and gave her plate a good lick. Yum, spaghetti sauce! On another afternoon the dog nosed into a bag Istra had left on the couch and found and half ate a candy a friend had given Istra at school. The drama has been intense.

As of day four, Valkyrie had pretty much mastered the stairs in and out of the house, both down and up. A little clumsy and spastic at times, but usually without any more fear and hesitation. 

Also around this time Selena started trying to dress her up! (She's attempting to convert an old sweater into a doggie sweater. Pictured is an early test fitting. The idea is that Valkryie may wear this sweater under her actual dog coat when the weather is colder. Greyhound skin and fur is very thin, and body fat is nearly non-existent, so they need lots of help in the thermal insulation department.)

Another problem with her growing confidence, however, has been that she has also shed her fear and caution of the cat. She is in fact extremely curious about the noisy little creature. And the cat is not at all pleased about this. And it's worried us a bit also. The cat has taken to staying in the basement most of the time, these days. So a new program to try to get them used to each other has begun. We have blocked off a few rooms in such a way that the cat can access but the dog can not. The cat still prefers to stay far away in the basement -- the dog can't get down there at all (even if she could manage the stairs, she would have to get through the kitchen to get to them, and she is not allowed in the kitchen). When we are around to keep an eye on things, we bring the cat up and close the basement door, to try to enforce some approximate proximity time. We still muzzle the dog when we feel the need. We have seen some improvement. The dog seems less fixated than she was when the cat is near or noisy, and more willing to give us her attention when we distract her. And the cat has crept out of the safety zones a few times to see where the dog is.  

By about the fifth day, Valkyrie has apparently grown attached to us enough that she is no longer tolerating staying in her crate all night. She's reluctant to go in the crate at all anymore, in fact. But she does go in when encouraged. However, she increasingly has started howling (or "rooing" as they call it with greyhounds) in the middle of the night, and showing signs of separation anxiety. The first few nights this happened, Selena came up (our room is in the basement) and slept on the couch, which quieted things down.

Apparently ex-racer greyhounds, when removed from their life-long environment of being surrounded by other dogs all the time, become extra dependant on the company of their adopted people. So, while when she first moved in with us we were looking for her to come out of her crate and be with us, now already she seems hardly able to tolerate being away from us for long without getting quite anxious. Ironically we are going to have to work on getting her used to being alone again. However, we don't want to stress her out over this at the moment, which can lead to other behavioural (or even health) problems. Everything has to be gradual... it is still early days.

We're still exploring. Still learning. Still getting used to the new world....

Croconaw, of course. But not Pikachu!

Here are the costumes the kids put together this year for Halloween. They are both pokemon. Emeth is Croconaw. And Istra is definitely not Pikachu! She is Pichu, obviously, as anyone can see!

Pictures (click for more) aren't very good. But anyhow, and here are also their pumpkins. We'll leave it as an diverting exercise for the reader to guess which is whose.

Meanwhile....

... but that's another story.

UPDATE! And then Grammie showed up with a severed head!! For real....

Valkyrie in the house...

Selena's age-old dream has finally come true. Brace yourself. She has (we have) a dog. And not just any dog, but her dream-dog; nothing less than an actual greyhound. Her dream-dog, with naturally nothing short of a mythic name. Friends, meet... Valkyrie.

Selena told me we were "just going to look" at the new dogs that had just come up from the States to Greyhound Relocation & Adoption Canada kennel, for fun. She later tells me that I "should have known better".

Valkyrie is an an ex-racing dog, who was not very good at racing. (Not unlike this oddly familiar fellow.) I'm not sure if that makes her lucky, or unlucky. Maybe a bit of both.

Anyhow, we went to pick her up... (I am surprised to suddenly realise) just yesterday! The adjustments and acclimatization has just begun. But here are some scenes from Vallie's first day with us...

The GRA kennel occupies a building on a farm about half way between Woodstock and Tillsonburg. There is a small lake at the back of the farm property with a nicely mowed walkway around part of it. We took Vallie out for a last walk around the farm, to stretch her legs before the car ride.

Valkyrie tolerated the car ride quite well. She had to be lifted in and out. We put the seats down, and provided her some blankets and her new crate mat. She stood there wondering what was going on, but once we got out to the road she lay down, and more-or-less relaxed for the rest of the trip.

When we got back, it proved awkward trying to get her out the back passenger door, so we opened the hatch back. Much to our surprise, Valkyrie suddenly leapt out immediately that way. So, surprising was it that her leash slipped. Luckily she didn't try to run off though, but just wandered onto Maria's lawn, where a grip on the leash was quickly recovered. Maria, our neighbour, came out immediately to see what was happening, and greet the new dog. Valkyrie, for some unknown reason, took a real liking to Maria --- even before Maria went and got her some treats. Maybe because she's relatively small and dressed all in black? Who knows!

Racing greyhounds lead very limited lives. Valkyrie is 2 years old, but she has probably never used stairs before. There are stories of greyhounds confused and stymied by what seem ridiculously obvious obstacles in their paths, having no experience of anything in their generally the flat way of their long  legs before, to which stairs are indeed highly complex maze in comparison. Vallie certainly (as we expected) had no idea how to navigate the stairs up to our door. (We took her around to the back, as there are a few less steps.) So here you see her nervously being lifted up the steps.  After barely more than 24 hours with us, and many attempts with varying levels of assistance, she is now already going up (the last two times) and down the stairs herself like a professional stair traverser.

You can also see here (sort of), Valkyrie's stylish new coat. We had just put it on her to show it to Maria.

When Valkyrie made it to the top of the stairs she met her next obstacle. The loudly wailing cat! Do not misunderstand, our cat always loudly wails! She has no other volume setting than 11. Her loud wailing was pretty much normal; though she did look a bit surprised and confused to see this big black alien creature coming to the door. Vallie was moderately interested in this loud furry little creature, but also cautious. We put Valkyrie's muzzle on her at this point, just to be safe. It really turned out to be more of a non-event than even we thought it would be. Both creatures seemed nervous of the other, the dog being probably the more nervous of the two. Neither acted aggressively, or attempted to flee, despite the close proximity.

The cat and dog have had a few more run-ins since that first meeting, going to and from the front of the house (where her crate is) to the back door. The most dramatic was when Win stood in Vallie's path and refused to move. Valkyrie merely showed curiosity and put his head down to sniff Win more closely. Win hissed and lifted a threatening paw. But Vallie backed off with a "so what's her problem?" look, and that was that.

Speaking of the back door, however, I can say that we've now sadly also had the experience that many ex-racer greyhound adopters report: the dog, not understanding the concept of transparent glass, walking nose-first into the door. Not only that, but earlier she also walked through our already-frail door screen -- it probably needed replacing anyhow. So it goes!

Anyhow, despite the back door/steps traversal complications, backyard time getting to know each other and the lay of the land has been fun.

Mommy got her first kiss.

And we saw her sit! Greyhounds are famous for generally not being able to sit like other "normal" dogs -- their legs work differently. But our greyhound is clearly super talented, and has figured out a way to curl her rear end around and sit on it. At least once! Amazing!

When we brought Valkyrie into the house the first time, we took the advice of dog training books and took her straight to her crate. We also figured this is what she is most used to, so would probably feel most comfortable with. This later thought, it turns out, is the rub (as Shakespeare would say, if he were here). We really can't get her to come out of her crate. She comes out only when her leash or harness is shown, and only to make the trip to the back door and go out for a walk or relief. When she comes in, she goes straight back to her crate. If we interfere with her going back to the crate she just stands like a statue and looks up at us in seeming confusion with sad eyes.

The very first time she went into her new crate here, we closed the door on her for a while. But we didn't feel right with it closed, so we decided to put her muzzle on her and leave the door open, and see how she'd respond to that. She didn't respond at all. She entirely ignored (seemingly unaware) that the door was open, and neither did she acknowledge the muzzle. She just curled up and lay there. After a few more trips through the house, we dispensed with the muzzle because it seems clear she has no aggressive (or even defensive) inclinations towards any creature in here. (Besides, one of us is watching her all the time.) And we've left the crate door open always, except while we slept.

She initially wouldn't even eat food outside her crate. We've taken to putting her bowls at feeding time just outside the crate door, and are moving them further away little by little. In time she will learn that she no longer has to be in her crate every moment when indoors. In fact, we want her company. Her new job is to be a part of the family.

Life is going to be different now. For all of us. Selena tells me it's going to be good.

So far, so good.