pinecone

That old joke/cliche about you buy your kids an expensive present and they play with the box. Well, Perry has a hankering for pinecones which I guess makes sense for a creature who is not that food motivated but still compelled to do the things puppies/young dogs/dogs generally do, which is destroy something they can easily manipulate. It's all about texture I guess. 

Yesterday we went to Eaglemont and Preston, I might treat you to some pictures from that trip later, although really it was fieldwork for work so there was a lot less quirk. As you can imagine, less quirk than the usually fairly quirkless pictures series I typically post is pretty nonquirk. I will say this: Perry was very well behaved. There's light at the end of the tunnel. He certainly deserves to decimate this pinecone, which he picked up in Eaglemont yesterday. 

well why not

$20 for an online ('personalised') dog training course with money back guarantee? OK (though I don't know how I would be able to prove it didn't work). Anyway, it's an unusual one, and starts with strong insistence that you watch training module videos. The first two of these videos, which I have watched in full (OK - I stopped watching after a while for reasons you will soon understand) were different shots of the same woman standing in what looks like a kind of gym or studio with an inattentive beagle wandering around. She is talking to us, the viewers, though shot from different angles, yet her mouth does not match up at all with the audio, which is almost certainly computer generated. 

At the end of the first one they asked me how I felt about it, so I told them 2 stars out of 5:

To be clear the voice is not exactly saying the same thing over and over but the same thing different ways, mainly, 'don't ask us questions before you've watched all the content'. Fair enough. 

Disconnected video-and-audio is a strange approach though and I assume it indicates firstly that people won't listen to something, unless they have something to watch even if it clearly doesn't match. Also, there's a possibility that what I'm watching is the same thing but translated into English and overdubbed, though definitely the voice I'm hearing is not actually a human speaking. 

But for me it's a low bar - I'm assuming that at absolutely worst this course will have a neutral effect. It is my plan to power through as quickly as I can. I'm hanging out for Keilor Dog Obedience to start for 2024, and for the personalised lesson which is also, by the way, 'guaranteed'. 

One thing that I am going to concentrate on first up is getting Perry to shake my hand. I mean, it demeans us both, but he is so firmly against it (to the extent that he'll leave the room if I try to make him do it) that I assume he thinks it means something other than that which it means (or he thinks it demeans us both, in which case, I agree). Oddly though occasionally I try to get him to jump on the couch next to me - sometimes he'll do that voluntarily but other times he needs persuasion - and in that instance, he'll raise his paw instead to couch height and let me shake it. So wtf does that mean? 

'It means you got a problem, fool'