Meet our new baby

My daughter has been begging for a dog for the past three years and this week we finally gave her her wish.  Meet Ember - our half German Shepherd half Cattle Dog puppy.  She is currently 9 wks old.

Our sweet pup was in a litter of 11 pups, 9 of which were healthy enough for adoption at 8 wks.  She was the biggest of the litter and the spunkiest of the batch that we visited.  So we thought she would be a good fit to our wonderfully alive and spunky house.

Her “safe spot” in Cyan’s room if we ever need to go out without her.  Which isn’t very often.

Someone told my daughter when we in the pet store “One day that dog will be able to do your homework!” and they are almost right.  5 days in a new house, and she already knows where to go potty (mostly outside unless we are not paying attention), ‘sits’ when she is asked, will ‘lay down’ and ‘come’ if you have a treat, and has discovered that she can push her pen over to the door so she can bang against it and we will come.  We had to put a stop to it, but that was impressive!  She is a SMART little dog!

We have been watching a lot of Victoria Stilwell dog training videos.  She has a wonderfully gentle manner that Cyan and I have employed to teach our little miss manners and new skills.  She has picked them up so fast it threatened to give me whiplash!  She’s really that smart!

Having only ever owned a Westie and Boxer before this, her mind and desire for training was something of a shock.  Not that those other breeds are unintelligent… but being German Shepherd/Cattle Dog mix, she is bred to watch for physical queues as well as verbal commands and when training is employed with this combination in mind, it isn’t more than 15 minutes before she has a new skill.  The trick will be for us to train her enough so that smart little brain of hers doesn’t make trouble!

Cyan is overjoyed and although tired (puppies are hard work)!   Ember has settled in very nicely and is currently laying at my feet, with a long leash we use for house training, chewing on her favorite treat, a pigs ear.  <3