Hi Ho Silver Away!

(As I missed blogging yesterday, this entry will suffice for both that day and Thursday). Spencer, I've learned, welcomes everyone as if you're his long lost mother. Including me. It was though he knew I was there do do some kind of good and I just had to be a friend, hadn't I? Now I have to admit I've never been welcomed like this by a cat; they just are, let us say, a little more refined.

This welcome has been unchanging in all the days I've shown up at his door. To say he's consistant in his unconditional "Hello-hello-hello-we-goin'-walkin'?" is to say the sun always rises. His people tell me now he sometimes sits just facing the door as though willing me (or someone else just as interesting) to appear. His optimism knows no bounds. If he's in the chair at the window, sometimes I hear him barking as I turn the corner and at that point I can't even see him nor him me but there it is. His people say he knows I'm coming!


As soon as Spencer knows he's going for a walk, his enthusiasm knows no bounds. The excitement can barely be contained in his muscular little body. And so we started out hit and miss routine: the missus managed to get a hold of his wriggling, ecstatic little body and clipped the six-foot leather leash to his neck collar and away we …er…flew!

With Spencer, there's simply no time to be wasted! The faster, the better. So much ground to cover, so many enticing smells, so many pitstops to make, so many friends to greet, so much to see, hear, smell, feel. So much joy to unload in the world. Enough to make one’s head spin.

Hanging onto his leash is akin to hanging onto a tow rope. You're on the move whether you're ready or not. To say he pulled me along is an understatement. It soon became evident, despite my best efforts to keep up with him, it wasn’t enough. His determination and energy combined with the restraint of the collar only served to choke and gag him. He was literally hanging himself horizontally! The gagging soon turned to hacking and the hacking to upchucking. Um. This dog-walking wasn’t working out the way I thought. What if I ended up asphyxiating him?!

There’s gotta be a better way, I thought, researching “dog pulling” in the web. Righto! Stop walking as soon as he pulls. Restart only when the dog realizes we go nowhere if there is tension on the leash. Implementing this on our first effort meant more stop than go; not much of a walk. But good old Spencer’s a quick learner! He caught on right away! We were more or less able to have a half decent walk without the drama of gagging except when other dogs (his friends Molly, Maggy or Ruffles) would show up and the excitement would overwhelm his self discipline!

Another web solution was to use a harness to encompass his chest with the happy result of standing him up on his hind legs every time he “pulled”. No more puking! I relayed this to his people and the local pet store graciously sold them a lovely blue harness, and thereafter our walks became far more fun for both of us.