The “let the dogs sort out their own differences” approach is continuing to work well for us. Most of the time their play now seems to be about fun rather than settling their positions in the pack hierarchy.

Dominance struggles still occur of course, but they’re usually over quickly. They are however very, very noisy. You can hear a sample of a dominance shouting match in the second video in a previous post. Beanie is by far the worst offender.

When Biggles starts a shouting match..

..she drowns him out with a deafening, high pitched warble.

It’s like a frantic canine version of Mariah Carey fed through amplification used by The Who in their heyday. Get any closer than half a mile from the stage and you’ve got permanent hearing loss, guaranteed.

To further help reduce the frequency of these outbursts we take away all the toys when they’re together. At one point I foolishly tried to have a three-way tug of war with them. It went great while I was still holding the tug rope, but as soon as I let go it became the cause of another (mercifully short!) dominance argument.

Overall though we’re having more and more harmony. We all spent a fair chunk of the afternoon in the sitting room watching and – miracle of miracles – hearing a video I rented on the way back from agility. Nobody needed to go in their crate, and there was only a little bit of a tussle while while I was trying to skip past the seemingly endless stream of trailers.

A few more pics from today: