Buster has earned many nicknames in his stay at our house: Peedro Morales, Dick Trickle, P. Shitty, Snarls Barkley, Buster Maniac, and Sir Barks-A-lot. This should tell you all you need to know about his demeanor and behavior. But, if you want the details, read on.
Actually, he’s doing pretty well with the house training–he’s down to only peeing in the house. We have some days where he doesn’t have any accidents and other days when he has a few. You can almost guarantee an accident if we all have to leave the house for something. But, given his age, this is forgivable. He’s not yet telling us when he has to go outside and this is a large contributor to the accident issue.
He’s been sleeping through the night for a week or two now. When I say this, I mean that he usually doesn’t get up until Brian’s alarm clock goes off at 5:45-ish, except on weekends, when he normally wakes sometime in the 6am hour.
My little photo experiment didn’t pan out quite like I had hoped–it’s near impossible to get a consistent shot of the dog. But, the photos are still interesting to look at, I think. You can definitely see a change in him from week to week.
Since I am now working in an office, Brian has the honor of taking care of Buster all day. Due to Brian’s diligence, Buster already knows a few commands, such as ‘sit’ and ‘drop it’. ‘Leave it’, ‘off’, and ‘don’t bite’ are works in progress. Unfortunately, this is taking up a lot of Brian’s time, which is already scarce. At least there’s a light at the end of the tunnel–he’ll be moving into the new office soon and won’t have to deal with a puppy all day.
Buster’s biggest issue at this point is when he turns into the “Buster Maniac” in the evenings. The evenings are when he lets off all of his pent up energy. It seems that he just can’t get enough exercise and we just have to deal with his craziness for two hours each night. If you’ve ever seen the movies 28 Days Later or 28 Weeks Later you’ll have some idea of how he acts–kind of like a puppy on the rage virus. Hopefully with training, exercise and age, he will outgrow this behavior.