Finny’s last day of being off-leash at Riverside Park

Well, that’s it. Finn is not allowed to go off-leash anymore. At least not for a while. He’s been terrible lately — running after squirrels so much that he becomes deaf, dumb and blind in the process. He won’t listen to me at all when he’s like that, and that can’t happen. The other day a woman went crazy on me when ran after a squirrel and cut her off. Her reaction was way over the top — screaming, threatening me. It was AWFUL. But I admit maybe she had a point. I didn’t have control of Finn at that point because he wasn’t paying attention to me.

Besides, Finn doesn’t have the stamina to run around that much and he doesn’t stop himself when he’s too tired. So I have to watch it for him because he’s very prone to having a heart attack. The heat really affects him and he pants so hard after really only a few minutes of running around.

So instead I’m going to walk him on a leash, like most people do. And see how it goes. I admit I’ve never really done that with him on a very regular basis. We usually only walk across the street to the park where I used to let him off-leash to run. So that’s my fault. I think if I had walked with him more when I first got him, he would be better about staying by my side at all times. So we started last week and I think it was good – for both of us!

But he does look cute running around all spastic. Enjoy the pics -

Handsome Devil

Look at that handsome boy!

The cutest hot dog!

Phinneus during the heat wave!

Sorry!

Sorry I’ve been totally remiss when it comes to this blog. My other blog for work is taking up all my blogging time! UGH

Anyway, so much going on. I think I’ll work backwards:

I have to complain about this new reality show, The Groomer Has It. I feel like it’s abusive to the dogs — and sometimes abusive to the dog owner! Maybe that’s an extreme accusation since I’ve really only seen one episode, and I even admit to fast forwarding through much of it in order to get through it. But still… I did still saw the whole episode, just sometimes a little faster.

In the episode I saw, the groomers descended upon a bunch of unsuspecting dogs and dog owners at a dog run. Many of the contestants approached them kind of agressively. Some went straight to the dogs and grabbed them, acting overly affectionate, so much so I felt like some dogs were scared. Other contestants were smarter about it and talked to the dog owners first. Those owners were the ones that were inclined to go along with their task: To give a dog a theme makeover. Sort of like costumes for dogs.

Anyway…to make a very long and upsetting show short…

Most of the dogs came out looking worse than before!

These groomers went way too far, in my opinion. Especially when they used hair-dye on the dogs. One dog-owner didn’t even know the groomer was dying her white poodle pink! Can you imagine giving your dog to a groomer and having it come back PINK?? That is so mean.

And other groomers, I thought, were way too rough with the dogs. There was this one dog (I think a Bermese Waterdog) that had long, mangy hair. The groomer used a metal brush and kept yanking, yanking at the dog’s hair to unknot it. He was pulling so hard that you could see the skin under the hair was pulling! If someone did that to me, I’d be crying.

I felt so bad for many of these dogs. The only one that looked great was the Golden Retriever, whose groomer did a beautiful – TASTEFUL – job. She let the dog be who he was, but prettied him up. She didn’t try to make the dog look like a person. I feel like that’s what many of the groomers were doing — applying human-based styling theories to dogs. That’s just wrong, no?

I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of people would disagree me on this, but the whole thing just freaked me out.