[nagdu] Relieving issues

[Tami Jarvis]

Larry,

You may be on to something. I recently switched to e-cigs, so I can 
smoke indoors... Which means I've had to come up with a new reason to go 
out with the dogs or to interrupt anything to go outside by a grassy 
area to stand around with my dog while she does what she does and I do 
what I do. When we're finished and have litter, she's very good at "find 
the trash."

Since I would take the dogs out with me when I would go to smoke, it 
turned out I would smoke whenever I took the dogs out. So when I got the 
puppy and was going out with the dogs every couple of hours, if not 
more, I did a lot of wondering why I kept running out of cigarettes so 
fast. Oops! /lol/ Now I'm used to going out without lighting up, but it 
took me awhile to get my sense of time spent outdoors without using the 
lifespan of one lit cigarette... So it can seem like I'm spending a 
longer time than I am and I'm more likely to start feeling impatient, 
especially in crappy weather when it's not fun to stay out and play. :(

I wonder, too, if people feel stress about relieving because of the 
expectations of the guide dog mythos that "those dogs relieve on 
command" in some magical sense that they only go when told and never 
hesitate or have scheduling issues or whatever. So then if a real dog 
isn't so robotic about it, there go the expectations, and my dog must be 
the only one that doesn't do it right... Well, I was told that a lot 
when Mitzi was a pup, which made it easy to sneer, since she was 
obviously a puppy, not a fully trained mature guide. Then she had that 
series of UTIs, so I got in the habit of giving her opportunities to 
relieve all the time. So that kept me from getting to uptight about it, 
although I did have to get over stopping at every patch of grass just in 
case once she was over the last infection. /shrug/

Tami

On 01/08/2015 07:04 AM, Larry D Keeler via nagdu wrote:
> Not being judgemental but, I have observed some correlations from my class and also from other situations. First, I smoke. Whether this a good or bad thing is not up for debate here. What is, is that us smokers at schools or in other situations go outside to do our business. While we're out there, we also bring our dogs. So, we figure that if we're out there, might as well let our dogs relieve themselves. We had a couple of us who smoked at pilot. and, one who went out with us for the socialization. We would smoke and go down to the relief area. I still do this at home. We had almost no issue with our dogs relieving themselves where they shouldn't. The ones who stayed indoors most of the time and didn't really have a reason to go out tended to have more issues with relieving. At least for me, that proves a correlation between relieving and how often one is outdoors. An interesting observation?
> Larry D Keeler lkeeler at comcast.net Intelligence is always claimed but rarely proven!
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