Ronnie (female)….Born 18/02/11…Our 8 week old guard dog!

by jacqueline stuart
(uk)

This is ronnie.

She is so confident, fearless and has even stood on guard growling and barking at the door.

She is so clever and picks things up very quickly. On the first day, we gave her a warm bath, wrapped and cuddled her in warm towels, she loved it! It’s like she accepted us instantly as her new pack. The first night left alone she howled her head off.

By day two she has learnt( a little hesitant with some commands but getting there) her name, to sit, give paw, release, no, leave it, come here and walks a little on her lead before she decides it’s a toy, all with the help of treats. She does look expectantly for a treat every time we say ‘good girl’ bless her. We don’t always give her one, maybe eighty percent of the time we do. Night two less howling but still plenty to wake us up.

I don’t think ronnie was the runt of the litter, judging by her character, but she acts like it with food. This is getting better though, we give her little and often and part of her daily food is used for rewards. We make her sit before we give it to her because she can’t get to it fast enough – we don’t want her doing that when she’s a big girl! Night three howling much less often.

Ronnie did start the dreaded ‘eating poo’ but with a firm ‘no’ and getting her away from it quickly she appears to be getting the message. We think she may have wanted the runnier ones more but we do find a poo in the morning so we are getting there. She just walked away from one now we’re very pleased to say! Night four howled for an hour during the night.

The vet here in Italy advised us not to give her her first shot immediately we got her ( i think he thought we shouldn’t put her through that when we first got her), to wait till after easter. We didn’t want to do this but he’s the vet!

Ronnie greets us all like she has been with us forever. It’s so amazing considering she has only been with us for four days.

We do spoil her rotten and give her the freedom we gave our previous rottie (we lost our beauty ‘sam’ on 21/02/11 after 10yrs – we have a web page for her on this site) she is only gated at night and when she is unattended.

Toys: we have the kong toy but she gets bored easily. We play (ALWAYS SUPERVISED) with an empty water bottle attached to a string (with stones in it sometimes for noise), a string with a small soft chewy bone tied on the end, empty yogurt pots (she licks the very little remains), toilet paper and paper towel, anything to distract from the out of bounds things.

I will post more pictures as she grows. Now I’m going to check out the site for other pups. Oh, don’t you just love the sweet rottie!