He was playing with a fairly large sighthound, whippet or similar. Clearly he wasn’t going to outrun this pup, so he was playing and getting fairly comprehensively beaten in the wrestling stakes. So he went off to the side of the field and laid down. We had tried to call him, which he ignored. One of the Scallywag trainers said this was “calming behaviour” and we should not call him at this point. He said what Finlay was doing was recognising he could not outrun or outfight this dog, so had taken it down a notch. The Whippet totally understood, and they had a quiet interaction until Finlay was ready for another round…..they chased each other and after a while off to the edge of the field Finlay went, calming again. Worked a treat. Although this was only his 2nd socialisation event, he is already showing that he is very clever in his interaction with other dogs. Don’t get me wrong, he is as I said full on so can overdo it at times, trying to mount dogs for instance, but he gets appropriately told off and that is all part of the learning. Scallywags group their pups by confidence level rather than physical size, so Finlay gets promoted up a couple of groups, you see quite a few shy pups and pups not so keen to get stuck in, Finlay is not that pup…..so he gets to play with the big boys.
Random picture from the Finlay library as still no pics of a romp day. This is Finlay taking his angst out on daddys finger.
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