I haven’t posted anything about our growing puppy in a while, so here’s a few photos and notes of our little teenager.
Jackson is a week shy of being 6 months. He weighs 55 pounds. While he isn’t gaining weight as quickly anymore, his body is growing longer and his head is getting huge. I’m guessing that as a full-grown dog he will weigh around/at least 80 pounds. His paws are really large and he’s definitely not even close to being the size he will be when he’s done growing.
As a teenager, Jackson is quite often a terror. I thought having a second puppy was going to be easy breezy, especially for the first 2 months or so, but we are currently in our challenging phase, I can see!
We finished up with our second round of puppy classes about a month ago, now, and were really unsatisfied with the lack of new material that was taught. Apparently we needed to take things into our own hands and teach Jackson some commands and obedience that we assumed would be covered in class. This week we have begun taking Jackson to a park in our neighborhood to “work” in the mornings. It’s helpful to place Jackson in slightly distracting areas that are outside of our house to give him the opportunity to learn and practice his commands in real settings. We also signed up for a third puppy class at Ahimsa, which is where we took Aspen. That doesn’t start until mid-October. In the meantime, we’ve got a daily checklist of things for both Alex and I to work on with Jackson.
Earlier this week we found out that Jackson has giardia, which is an extremely common {and obnoxious!} parasite in dogs. It’s very easy to contract and very difficult to get rid of. We are hoping that with medication he’ll fight it quickly.
In finding out Jackson has giardia we realized that we were over feeding him by accident. He wasn’t eating all of his food and that caused a little anxiety in us because we wanted to make sure he was getting enough food and nutrients, but being the good pup he {sometimes} is, he was eating only what he needed to eat. {We hadn’t realized/remembered that when puppies hit 5 months old, their food intake needs start to decline, so we were still feeding him based on the 3-4 month old requirements, which were nearly double what the 5 month old requirements are. No wonder he wasn’t eating everything!}
