Stylin' for Success

Wednesday, we headed downtown to meet Michelle for a training walk. The great thing about downtown walks is that you never know what you're in for. At various times we've encountered protest marches, tour groups, heavy machinery, emergency vehicles, and of course other dogs. You can almost always count on running across a street musician. And then last week, while we were sitting nicely at a curb waiting for the walk signal, a man riding a bike leaned over and patted Duckie on the head as he whizzed by! Go figure.

Dakota adores Michelle and got a little too excited when we met up, as you can see! But we stopped in at Starbucks before heading out to walk and while the people got caffeine and sugar levels up, he worked on calming down. After that, things went pretty well.

One thing Dakota really needs to work on is his "overheads." It will be his job not only to guide safely around street-level obstacles, but also to avoid any overhanging obstacles (tree limbs, etc.) which would be a hazard to his blind partner. This is a pretty tall order for a dog currently only 18" at the shoulder! He's really going to have to watch ahead and develop the habit of looking up. We were talking about it with Michelle, and decided that he could use a haircut to help clear that peripheral vision a little. His cute bushy doodle fur hangs around his eyes so that he'd have to kind of crane his neck to see up. Here are a couple of "before" shots.

Getting a little shaggy there!

This isn't Dakota's first furcut, and he's learned to tolerate it, but it's not his favorite thing. I decided to be conservative with the trimmers at first, being kind of new at this dog clipping thing, and figuring it'll be easy to go back and cut off more if need be.

All done! It's not drastically different, but I can really see his eyes a lot better now. Hopefully that will make his work a little easier for him.

Time to go outside and play!