I took Beanie to Bellahouston Park this morning for a change of scenery, and we certainly got it:

For the benefit of those who’ve never been to Bellahouston before, that lake is not a normal feature of the park. The same goes for the two swans who presumably flew in for a visit. Somewhere under that water there’s a field and a tarmacced footpath!

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:

It’s beginning to look as if having a little brother at home to play with is helping to calm Beanie down and improve her concentration and attention span. On Wednesday Beanie was a lot more focused during her obedience class. The same thing happened today at agility. We took Biggles along to watch the first part of the class, so maybe Beanie was trying to impress him :)

I’m really very impressed by how well Beanie and all her classmates are doing despite the fumbling inadequacy of their handlers. It might look easy, but it really is very hard when you have a fast dog to always be in the right place at the right time to guide your dog through the course.

Beanie is now coping well with quite complicated courses involving several jumps, 90 and 180 degree turns and of course the tunnel (her favourite). She really has surprised me as I didn’t think she’d have the concentration to follow instructions. Fortunately, she enjoys it so much that she’s eager to do everything she’s told just to get to play. Also our teacher Carol is exceptionally good. So if anyone’s thinking of trying agility I recommend www.clearrunagility.co.uk

We’ll try and get some more photos and video next week. It’s getting a bit tricky now that we’ve got Biggles, but I’m sure someone will be happy to cuddle him for a few minutes while Paul takes photos.