The Boys

After reading several blogs about pets yesterday (HERE, HERE, and HERE) I realized that I haven't really talked about The Boys yet, and figured I should remedy that today.

The Boys consist of our Australian Cattle Dogs (also known as Heelers): Dingo & Rocky.

Here they are back in June at the girl's Birthday party.



As you can see, Dingo is a red heeler, and Rocky is a blue heeler.

We got Dingo after we had been married for about a year, and I often refer to him as "My Furry First Born".



We rescued him from a pretty bad situation. He was living outside, completely untrained, with his litter mates until he was 5 months old. He was covered with mud, and crying for food. Poor baby. We really don't know what his first few months were like, but we suspect that he was abused because once he hit adulthood he started showing some aggressive tendencies, and it wasn't until we got him fixed that he mellowed into the wonderful loving dog he is today.



Dingo is a total lovey. And he's totally mine, like it or not. He's so attached to me that he won't let anyone else let him outside to go potty besides me. He's afraid that we'll close the door and then he'll be separated from me... and that would just be TERRIBLE! Being separated from me is just about the most horrible thing Dingo could imagine. He's very unhappy when I leave the house and don't take him with me. Hubs calls him my Furry Boyfriend. lol

Oh, and he absolutely loves the girls (Notice: we have The Girls and The Boys in this house, obviously we just had to have twin girls to keep the balance!) Here he is with Ziva bouncing on him. And he just laid there, totally content to let them do whatever they wanted to him.



He's really a great family dog, and I'm so glad we stuck it out and worked with him through the first year or so because there were several discussions about finding him a new home.

Then there's Rocky. We got Rocky as a little bitty baby puppy. And he was SO cute! The fattest friendliest puppy in the litter.





Dingo was about 2.5 years old when we got Rocky, and he really had a hard time with the transition. Dingo seriously moped around for about a year before he adjusted to his new "sibling". And he did the same thing when we brought the girls home, Dingo is just a very moody dog, very smart, but very moody. I think Dingo would have been very happy to be the only pet of a childless couple, but that's just not in the cards for him.

Notice... I've moved on to talking about Rocky, but I still can't stop talking about Dingo?

Shhhhh... it's because I don't really like Rocky that much! DON'T TELL!

So yeah... Rocky. :P He's friendly and all, but he's a royal pain in the butt. He's of course the typical Cattle Dog, whereas Dingo is pretty much the exception to the rule. Where Dingo doesn't make a peep unless someone rings the doorbell, Rocky is a total loudmouth, and is scared of his own shadow, and as a result never shuts up! And let me tell ya, super fun trying to keep a dog quiet all day when you've got a day sleeper in the house. We've tried EVERYTHING, including shock collars (which didn't really work), and finally about a month ago Hubs ordered this electronic dog whistle online and let me tell you... it's awesome! I love it because it's totally humane, it just makes a noise he doesn't like, and BOY does he hate it! One little touch of that thing and he stops barking and jumps to it. As a result my relationship with Rocky is improving. :)

He is seriously cute though, which is probably why he's such a spoiled brat.

This is him in our water feature in the back yard.



He is totally utterly ball obsessed. And in between chasing balls he likes to cool off in what he thinks is his personal doggy pool.

Overall I think his poor behavior is just a victim of our life at the time when we got him. We were frustrated with trying to conceive our own baby, and since we couldn't have our own as quickly as we were hoping we settled for him instead. Then in that first year of owning him I realized that walking 2 dogs is a LOT harder than walking one. And walking Rocky was no fun at all because he would bark at every little leaf that happened to cross our path. It was totally embarrassing! And I had no idea what to do about it, so I ended up not walking/training him as often as I should have. And when he was about 9 months old we found out I was pregnant, and after that I was pretty much not well enough to walk to the mailbox let alone walk a freaky barking dog around the blog.

Sigh...

So we ended up just playing fetch with him in the backyard instead, which he was totally thrilled with.

Until he hurt his knee. :(

I think that's probably when I actually started to bond with Rocky, because I felt sorry for the little guy.

Anyway, the vet says he's fat and needs regular exercise (but not fetch because it's too strenuous) and that both dogs need to be on a diet. They've been on a diet now for a year, and Dingo's only lost 1 lbs. So obviously we need to be better about that. Hard when they swipe up all the high chair droppings. Once they've lost weight then it might be time to get Rocky knee surgery. I hate to even think about it because I know it'll be like $1500 at least, but I also hate to leave him like this in pain when he's a very young dog.

The good news is he also likes the girls, although he's more particular about how they touch him and such. I can't blame him for that, I don't like the way the girls touch me sometimes either. lol



So that's our whole family. :)