Teach me, big brother

I love this photo... a young sister looking up to her older brother for guidance. I am using R to teach Shyla about recalls. She happily follows him as he zooms to me when I say "Dogs Come"! (You can see in R's eyes that he's not 100% yet - he'll have a blood test tomorrow to see how he's coming along. You can also see part of his shaved belly.).

After I called, R moved first and then Shyla followed.

R beat her by a few strides, mainly because he has been trained to have a very high drive to do recalls FAST! Shyla is very speedy and will be matching his pace before too long.

You can see in the next photo how much Shyla is built like a fast running dog! Her legs are long and her body is light. She'll certainly grow a bit more and fill in but I bet that her basic graceful and athletic shape will remain the same.

A big part of why I work very hard at training my dogs to behave well in the forest is that we have such abundant wildlife.

For example, over almost a week recently, a magnificent mountain lion paced a route among some of my cameras. He must have killed a deer or elk near there and was staying near his meal. I captured hundreds of photos of him. I'll be showing you the best of them plus some video in the coming days.

Mountain lion attacks on dogs are extremely rare. When they do happen, they occur when a dog is spending long periods of time roaming the forest by him/herself, something that our dogs never do. I've only seen mountain lions in person a few times, and they were terrified of my dogs each time. Nonetheless, I make sure that I can call my dogs away from wildlife, for their safety and that of the wildlife.