Hannah

  Somehow time has flown by, and I haven’t sent an update on Hannah in a long time!  I thought I would take a minute to write and let you know how she’s doing.  I don’t know if her inmate handler (Mark at James River) is still in the system, but, if so, please pass this along to him.

Hannah has turned out to be a very funny dog.  She doesn’t always behave perfectly, but there’s just something about her that makes it hard not to laugh at her antics.  Playing fetch is definitely her favorite thing, and she can catch the frisbee easily now.  She loves playing with other dogs, too, and we try to take her to the dog park when we can so that she can do that.  We also just started taking her to a small doggie day care (just 1-3 other dogs) once a week so that she can spend the day playing while we are at work.

One highlight has been watching her learn to swim.  Our dog park has a lake, but all spring she was reluctant to go in, even if the other dogs were swimming.  One day, I was trying again to get her to swim by throwing sticks out into the water for her to retrieve.  You could almost see the light bulb going off in her head when she finally realized that she could swim.  Now she loves it!  In fact, she has really impressed people there because of her retrieving instincts.  A couple of times, people have thrown toys into the lake but their dogs haven’t gone to get them and they have no way of getting them back.  I can take Hannah to the edge, point to the toy, and say “Hannah, go get that toy!” and she’ll swim out and get it even though it has been floating there for 10 minutes or more.

We spent a weekend at a cabin with some friends who have a 1-year-old. 

  Hannah did GREAT with the toddler.  In fact, we decided they were at about the same developmental level, so they were a perfect match.

She is doing well with a lot of her commands (sit, down, wait, give, leave it, “where’s your tail”, playing dead).  We are still working on her loose leash walking–she just has so much energy that she has trouble slowing down to a walk!  I feel confident that we’ll get there, though, as she has proven to be a very clever dog.

She?s become much more affectionate, and will now slow down enough to 

get petted and hugged (which was hard for her in the beginning).  

She’s great and we love her a lot!

I’ve attached a couple of pictures.  One is from a hike we took near the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The other is her eating an apple at our annual cider making party.

Thanks!  I’ll try to send updates a little more often!

Michelle

Deegan is another rescued dog that was trained and adopted to a loving home through PenPals.

Chima a rescued dog who was trained and then adopted to a family through PenPals.