Pet Help

I have a German Shepherd, she’s around eight months old now, and while she was very easy to train initially, she seems to be going through another puppy stage.

She’s recently discovered, much to my dismay, that she loves to bark; though thankfully she’s now gone past the barking at whatever strikes her fancy to only barking at the possum that has an annoying habit of running across our roof in the middle of the night.

We’ve always had shepherds, my parents used to breed them, and I don’t think I’d ever have another type of dog (many years ago, along with our shepherd, my parents in their wisdom for some reason decided we needed another dog and we got a shetland sheepdog - he was a pretty good dog, but we all had a habit of tripping over him, when you’re used to a bigger breed those little things are often hard to spot, not to mention that being long-coated he required a lot of extra grooming) but to get back on track -

I’ve always considered them to be fairly intelligent dogs, usually easy to train, great with kids, and often just the fact that you had a german shepherd in your backyard can be enough to turn off those would be trouble makers. My pup is showing all those signs, though I’m quickly being reminded of the fact that they only show their intelligence when they want to - if they are not ready to do something, well you just need to wait for them.

She’s learnt to open the pantry door, as I discovered when I woke up the other morning to see all sorts of things strewn across my kitchen floor. My previous shepherd quickly worked out how to open the doors to let herself inside of a nighttime so with this one I just leave her inside (figured I’d save her the trouble and me my doorknobs)

My kids seem to be slowly learning to pick up after themselves if they don’t want their toys and clothes chewed up, but it appears I still have a lot to learn after having spent an hour looking for the remote control for the televsion, thankfully I found it before she really had a chance to destroy it - but my lesson has hopefully been learnt.

As for now she’s sitting at my feet, staring up at me, obviously she knows I’m writing about her if the expression on her face is any indication - she’s trying to look innocent, I better go and pay her some attention before she decides my computer cords make good chew toys.

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