Chet Baker, Alpha Dog

Homecoming night for Phoebe. Chet Baker's 12th birfday, December 12, 2016.  She puts him through his tricks. Or tries to. Prepare to be amazed!  For me, the highlight of this video is not Chet's prowess at tricks.

 It's the oinking. Turn your volume up. He oinks when he sits up (0:17) and again when he flops down to play dead (0:45).



The dog whisperers among you will note that Chet is not the most deferential of dogs. He was the dominant pup in a two-pup litter, nearly twice the size of his sibling.

photo by Jane Streett, Boston Terrer Breeder Emeritus Extraordinaire

Hard to believe our little chunker ever fit in someone's palm but there you have it: newborn Bacon!

 And a bit later, when he was coming into his Bakertude:

photo by Jane Streett, Boston Terrer Breeder Emeritus Extraordinaire

When a pup starts out life as the dominant one in the litter, he can be expected to cop an attitude with people, too. The point being, Chet has been a bossy guy from the get-go. On the day we went to pick him up, he stood down Liam, just five years old, barking and even growling at him. Even at 9 weeks of age, he took a look at our little family, figured I was Alpha, Phoebe, 9 years old, was #2 in line; and Liam was destined only for domination. Chet wanted Liam's place. He wanted to be #3, and while I was at her kitchen table, still going over care instructions with his breeder, Jane Streett, Chet was already working on that hierarchy. We piled in the car, kept him in his pet carrier for about one mile, and then he came out to sleep on a delighted Phoebe's lap for the duration of the trip. "I was the happiest person in the world," Phoebe remembers. When he'd wake up, his little flop ears would prick, and he'd bark and growl in his ridiculous puppeh voice at Liam!! The audacity of that babydog!

 I chuckle to think of it now, but I remember wondering what we'd signed onto. I'm sure Liam did too!  Jane told me to teach Liam how to roll Chet over on his back and hold him down "until he goes limp as spaghetti." With some strong correction, the barking and growling stopped, but Chet freely engaged in dominance mounting of his blonde brother until he had an attitudectomy (highly recommended for bossy boy dogs).  Oh this photo. See how Liam's protecting his wee little hands? :) Just good practice around puppies, but especially around tiny sock-sweatered Baker.

It got better. Chet quickly became Liam's living teddeh bear. 

 Even now, though, I see traces of that #1 Puppy. He does things with the kids he'd never try with me. H can be seen dissing Phoebe throughout this video: lunging for the treat, storming the castle in the rudest way, and even giving her a little snarly-poo at the very end (1:27), when she reaches to grab hold of him. He's a naughty boy, copping the same attitude as a grampa as he did as a pup. 

He's not perfect, never has been, because I'm far from a perfect dog trainer. But we love him, warts, oinks, emanations, snarls and all. He's 99.9% wonderful. 

Also a major babe magnet.

Chet Baker, Bamboozler

Chet Baker is a bossy dog. Demon is not. Demon is our neighbordog. And Chet's been bamboozling him since he was a galumphy pup.

Chet will now demonstrate The Stare. 

Dominant dog stares directly into subordinate dog's eyes. If the subordinate dog knows what he's doing, he looks away. Meeting The Stare is tantamount to starting a fight.

Demon doesn't want that. Even though he could eat Chet in two bites, he's completely bamboozled by the little Napoleon.

Please, please, don't beat me up. I'm backing slowly away from your magnificence.

As well you should. For I have a can of whoop-ass here and all I have to do is open it. And you don't want to know what's inside it, Demon. You don't want to know.

27 pounds. And Demon probably outweighs him by 100. It's all in the attitude, folks.

Things Seen While Running

That last post was a hogchoker. I should have split it in two, saved a little for Tuesday, but I guess it all had to come out right then. Blogging can be like a conversation with a friend when you keep thinking of things to say, when it's hard to hang up.

It's the first day of hunting season, gray and mild as luck would have it, and I can't take Chet Baker out for a morning run for several reasons. Stray bullets, for one. Boom. Boom boom. Alarmingly close. His ever-increasing apprehension at booms, for another. We went for a five-mile run yesterday afternoon, which was sort of a mistake. It was the evening before hunting season started, and there was a steady stream of speeding pickup trucks hurtling by us. They were all provisioning, getting settled in their digs, sighting in their rifles. Boom, boom, boom. Only four slowed down at all when they saw a woman with an unleashed dog on the road. As someone who spends between one and four hours a day, defenseless, out on these country roads, I don't understand people who won't slow down for pedestrians and animals. What in your life is so important that you can't do that?

But I digress. As night neared the booms got more and more frequent and Chet just lined out ahead of me. I kept calling to him to wait, and he would stop, one paw lifted, for a second or two, then he'd set off running again. He wanted to go HOME and HOME NOW. He was like a horse that smelled the barn, ears laid back, bit in his teeth. When we got to my car he boinged and boinged as if the door would magically open without me in there. Poor little buddy. The older he gets the less he appreciates booms.

This morning, while the fusillade rings, I have him buried deep in his bed with blankies piled over his ears. He's not going out. (But then we DID go out during the midday lull, and it was fine, only two distant shots. Except that he got very muddy and needed a hot bath upon our return.)

Yes. I am muddy, but I have brought this old ball all the way up the driveway. That is muddy work.

I actually like the idea of a hot bath in the morning. That will be fine. I will go straight to the tub when we go inside. I have leafbits stuck to the slobbers in the corners of my jowls. Please take care of those when you do my hair?

It was warm enough that Liam, who didn't have school today, came with me and shed his flame-orange shirt while we rested at the cemetery. It was only 52, but that feels warm when you're all heated up from climbing these dadburn hills.

On our run last evening, we met a little Jack Russell terrier we had never met before. 

Chet got all tall and stiff and his tail stuck straight out as the little dog tried to make friends.

He was eerily silent and still, which confused the JRT and sent him running to hide behind my legs. Here you see the T posture, with Chet at right angles to the JRT. That's a dominance move on Chet's part. You can see the uncertainty in the set of the JRT's ears, the worried look in his eyes. Chet's all bristly and bossy.

Chet raised the hair on his back and loomed over the little dog. He stared into the terrier's eyes until the JRT looked away. He snarled up against the smaller dog's shoulder a couple of times, too, earning a loud rebuke from me. He's just not nice to strange dogs. Even though he seemed to have the JRT completely bamboozled, the last thing I wanted him to do was to press an attack. Because JRT's are tough little customers, and it wouldn't be pretty for either one of them. He was a perfectly nice little dog, met with arrogance by my old man.

How he can be the best possible dog around people and such a putz to other dogs, I don't know. Life with Chet Baker. I finally had to escort the JRT back to his yard. 

I wanted to tell you the nice thing we saw last night.  In the last post, I'd found a deer carcass dumped by the roadside, and I said, "I hope it will be a nice feast for coyotes or foxes, or even hawks and owls." Well, when I got there, I saw that the ribcage had been very neatly picked as with fine tweezers. Nothing was chewed. The meat was just removed. And I knew the surgical beak of a hawk or an owl had been applied to the carcass, and I was happy. Then, amazingly, my eye caught big wings coming through the trees, and a red-tailed hawk alit in the gloaming on a tree right over the carcass. I raised my tiny running binoculars and caught that belly band, that tail, that hooded head. And I knew who had been feeding there. When she saw me she flew, acting as if she hadn't intended to take her dinner there. I felt bad, but that's how it goes for us two-legged animals. They see you, they leave, no matter how much you love them. So I took the plastic bags full of scraps and emptied them next to the carcass. There was some lovely meat in there. I got deer blood on my hands, but I was glad to give her something good for the morning. Then Chet and I ran home.