Hi Grete,

Hope that you and your family are all doing well (and hope your daughter who went to South America had a good time).

I promised to send some pictures of Olly, so here they are.

Everything is going well with Olly, she just finished her first ’heat’. We had a hard time because she had surgery on the middle of her back to remove a 2.5cm wart, so she had stay inside for two weeks – during heat… blood drops everywhere and lots of cleaning. Next time we will buy dog nappies!  Now the heat has finished and surgery has healed very well, everything is back to normal.

Training is good; she responds to all the basic commands now and is fully house trained. We have semi-controlled her jumping on visitors at the entrance door but she still needs work on her barking. When she is outside she barks a lot. We love the sound of her deep bark but for two or three hours, non-stop, it becomes too much. So more work is needed. We have a professional dog trainer who has been coming for two hours every week since we collected Olly from you and her work with Olly has been a very good investment for our family.

Olly is now becoming suspicious of some visitors and barks at them. She doesn’t like motocycles and bicycles and barks at them on the street but she loves playing in the snow and catching bubbles with the children.  In Spring, we will start some simple security training with some controlled bite work.

She is the perfect dog for us, kids love her (although when Olly was smaller we had to constantly watch her with the children when playing. Olly would get too excited and grap the kids clothes and sometimes tear them, she would also scratch the children with her paws, only playing but it hurts the children). With the children and soft things like toys and shoes, she has a very ‘soft bite’ when playing, so that is good. Now the children and Olly can play together un-supervised, Olly knows not to jump on them and not to bite clothes. All is good.

So that is the update on Olly… we are all very happy.

Take care.

Joe.

Olly (Olga) von den Gänsewiesen