Alpha Bitch shows her stuff

I'm not always sure I love my little Alpha Bitch. When I adopted her from the shelter, she was mostly a little bear-like furball, and since I've always had a fondness for bear-like furballs, I wound up bringing her home.

At the time, I thought I wanted a dog about the size she's turned out to be, although since then, I've wished she were only about half as large. I've never been too fond of sweeping up dog hair, either, but that barely crossed my mind when I adopted a pound puppy that looked like a bear. So sometimes I don't like that too much.

She has a really strong protective sense so that she won't even let my sweet Miss Kitty up on the bed with me, and she's got a strong waking reflex so that if anything touches her when she's asleep, her autoresponse is to snap back. So far she hasn't hurt anybody, but it's pretty annoying if I move in my sleep and get snapped at.

But she's good at winning friends when I tell her to "stick ’em up" and she pops her front paws into the air until I tell her "Bang!" so she can roll over and play dead. She does some other tricks, too, which are pretty good for entertainment.

I'd never been much of a ball-player before I got her, and I didn't make a point of playing fetch with her when she moved in, either—but that all changed when her "cousin" Bubba (my Soldier Son's dog) moved in. I've written here before about how Bubba got started with fetch (although Number One Son correctly advises me that the way he plays, it's mostly "catch").

Shortly after NOS moved in, SS went out in the yard to practice swinging a golf club he had just acquired. He made a fine game of chipping the dog ball for the dogs to fetch, which worked fine until he chipped one over the fence into the neighbor's yard. We took turns going next door (the house was vacant then) to see if we could find it, but none of us had any luck with that. A day or two later, Bubba managed to slip out the front door into the yard and down the street with a ball just like it, but when we got Bubba back, we didn't get the ball. I was cranky that day, and I was ticked off that the two boys had managed to lose two relatively new, really nice balls just days after I had bought them.

NOS hopped in his car and took off to buy more balls to shut me up. (No, I wouldn't have been much surprised if he had brought them home and shoved them in my pie hole. Fortunately, by the time he got home, we had both cooled down a lot.) I grabbed a leash, took Bubba next door, and told him to find the ball.

At first, Bubba had a grand time sniffing around the neighbor's yard, and nothing he went near seemed to have anything at all to do with the ball. He finally got tired of exploring, though, dragged me about 40 feet from where the boys had said the ball should be, stuck his nose in the bushes, and pulled it out. The look on his face pretty much said, "That's enough now. Let's play ball!"

We started keeping a leash by the back door so that if the balls tipped out over the fence, we could put Bubba on duty to find them; we've only lost one ball since then, and that may have been because NOS didn't trust Bubba to find it in the dark; by morning, it was gone.

AB never seemed to think it was fair that she was stuck in the fence when Bubba went out to find the balls, so one day NOS let her go out with them—and she found the ball before Bubba did. In fact, even though we hadn't made any real effort to train her to stay close without a leash, we soon discovered that she normally would, so NOS started taking her to find the ball instead of Bubba, saving the effort of getting the leash.

In fact, one day this week, Bubba tipped a ball over the fence, and I just sent AB out to find it on her own. Bubba and I went back to the place where we'd last seen it from the inside, and seconds later, AB had the ball.

This afternoon, Bubba managed to get out the back gate. We don't know why it was open except that several years of sand buildup may have just pushed it too far, but when NOS let the dogs out, Bubba headed straight out the gate and away.

We've discovered that one way to get him back is usually to take a ball onto the driveway and bounce it, calling him to play. Until today, that's worked pretty well.

Today, he came flying down the street, caught the ball, and flew right on past NOS and into the back yard. He emerged a few minutes later from between two houses farther down our street. Without the ball.

NOS caught up with him across the street, where he was heckling the dogs in the neighbor's yard. I asked about the ball, and NOS was sure we'd never see it again.

Alpha Bitch to the rescue. I went to the backdoor, got out the leash, and started out. At first, I just pointed her to the backyard and told her to find the ball. She headed toward the usual places, sniffed under some interesting bushes, and tangled the leash around a dead branch. She worked her way somewhat erratically across one neighbor's yard, up to the front of the next one, and across it to visit with the neighbor who was setting up a lawn sprinkler. No ball.

NOS was back in our front yard, so I quizzed him again about Bubba's adventure. He had started in our back yard, so he could as easily have dropped the ball by the gate, which had long since been closed. AB and I headed there.

That didn't work, so I urged her again to find the ball. This time she followed more of the route NOS had suggested: behind our little barn, through the jungle the neighbor and I consider our back yards, and into the next yard over, this time without working her way to the front. There she stopped to nibble the grass—something she doesn't have a chance to do in her own barren yard. She really, really wanted to eat the little plant she was working on, but I finally dragged her away from the grass, reminding her we needed to find the ball.

This time, she cut across one more yard, working her way to a small, fenced side yard where the neighbors let their pint-sized dogs out to play. She leaned in to sniff at the fence, too curious about the hole under it to look much to her right or left. She might have if I had let her, but I didn't see a need to: she had taken me three houses away and found her ball!