Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

Frankie

Frankie is a 6 mo old black lab. He and his littermates have been in a shelter for several months. Apparently the shelter they were in finds it very difficult to place black male dogs. He weighs in at about 45 lbs or so. Of his littermates, he’s the most people friendly. We brought him home and need to housebreak and crate train him. Overall, he’s been pretty good, he’s had a few accidents in the house, but he seems to be learning.He seems to think he’s the dominant dog in the household. He’s tried to establish dominance with Sheba and Quinn. Sheba would not tolerate it a bit, while Quinn was ambivalent. If Quinn is distracted by the tennis ball, Frankie can do anything, but when Quinn is not distracted, he won’t allow it either. Frankie has tried to play with our dogs, but since they are old and cranky, they only sporadically play with him. I’d assume after a few more weeks, they’ll start to play a little more.

When it comes to food, Frankie is definitely psychotic. Apparently he was only fed once a day at the shelter, so he’s still always very hungry. Whenever he sees food, he’ll go a little nuts and shove his way to get it. We didn’t think it was possible, but Frankie actually eats faster than Quinn. We currently feed him three times a day to try to fill him up. If that fails, we’ll have to try overstuffing him to see if that helps. When you overstuff, you give the dog as much food as he can eat. He’ll probably throw it up, but it might help just to have a full stomach for once.

Frankie Update

After about a week of feeding Frankie three times a day, he finally stopped gorging his food and now he’s just chowing it down like a normal lab. Its amazing how much energy he has; he always want to play and Sheba and Quinn have not gotten any better with playing with him. Frankie did help us realize that there is no way we’d ever get a puppy. Housebreaking, crate training, and entertaining a puppy is a lot of work. To housebreak Frankie properly, he needs to either be in his crate, or monitored at all times while he’s out of the crate. That means we weren’t free to do things around the house if Frankie was out of our sight. However Frankie is very cute and cuddly, and was fun to play with. He was adopted fairly quickly to a family that absolutely adores him.