For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

Yesterday we bought some vegetables, including two super-hot habanero chile peppers for my husband to use in the salsa he makes in our bread machine. After we got home, though, we could only find one pepper. Well, okay, the other one must have gotten lost en route to the kitchen, we figured. He made his salsa with just one and it was hot enough.

Rottweiler Lola at momentary rest  This afternoon, we were out in the yard, in our swimming pool, when I noticed Lola chewing on something. She chews on lots of things… being two and a half now hasn’t really diminished her love of chewing on all sorts of things. She was a ways away from the pool and I couldn’t really see well, but  some guests had just left and one had been using a cellphone in the yard. That seemed to be roughly the size of item Lola was munching… could our friend have set his cellphone down? I was suspicious enough to get out of the pool and walk toward Lola.

Well, of course, she read my body language just fine and was all set for a good game of keepaway. I got close enough to her to see that whatever she had was green, so I figured it was not a cellphone and therefore not a problem. Back to my swim!

Lola seemed a bit disappointed that I wasn’t going to play, and after a bit she dropped her treasure up by the house. It was still there when I got out of the pool. I was able to pick it up without her grabbing it again.

It was, as you knew all along, the missing habanero pepper.

What’s most interesting about this episode to me is that she must have stolen it off the kitchen counter a good 24 hours before I got ahold of it. The pepper was dented all over from being in her mouth, but she had not broken its skin. Proof she has a soft mouth!

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I can’t always get things out of her mouth, partly because I really value my fingers highly. But I do play a lot of substitution games with her, and she will always (well, practically always) give up one thing for something different. That was my plan if it had been a cellphone. If I had realized what it was when I got out of the pool, I would certainly have offered her one of her balls or a nice stick lying in the yard as a trade.

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