Honey the Great Dane

(sorry – this should have been posted earlier this week but was delayed because of the horrible incident – please see the last post for the reason!)

Well! I had a very busy weekend -

It started with me helping the humans with all the leaves in our garden which have fallen down from our tree. Because it is Autumn now, the leaves are falling every day and even though my humans keep sweeping constantly, they just can’t keep up!

First I helped Hsin-Yi sweep up all the leaves into a big pile…

…as you can see, I was working really hard.

Then I helped Paul put them all into a big bin with wheels, which we then put outside our house and a big truck machine from Sunshine Garden Bags comes to empty it so we can put more leaves inside!

Of course, after all that hard work, I needed a little snooze…

Then my humans took me to Shore Rd Reserve, which is an off-leash park, and threw my tennis ball for me to fetch – YAY! This is my favouritest game in the world!

Hsin-Yi says I am “ball-obsessed” which I think means that I just cannot think about anything else when I see a tennis ball.

I don’t care if there are other dogs there, yummy food, loud noises, other people, children…all I care about is the ball – and when are they going to throw it for me?!?!

 

 While we were at Shore Rd Reserve, we met Hugo – one of my old friends from training class at the All Breeds Obedience Club. He is a 3yr-old Greyhound-Bullmastiff cross and he is VERY fast!

Hugo was very naughty in class and always used to run away so that his poor human would have to spend most of the class chasing him…he was a bit better behaved this time but still had a lot of his naughty habits – like jumping up to playbite humans in the face. This is a very rude thing for dogs to do – some humans can get really frightened and even those who aren’t, might get hurt ‘coz us dogs have sharp teeth even if we don’t mean to use them.

Anyway, Hsin-Yi felt a bit grumpy because he jumped up at her and stuck his nose into the camera machine’s face instead!! So the round glass face of the camera machine got all dirty and she was really worried that it was scratched…all the pictures she was taking afterwards were blurry in the middle. But thankfully, when we got home, she cleaned it carefully and it was OK again. Naughty Hugo!

When we got home from the park, Paul gave me a nice grooming session.

Hsin-Yi hates doing grooming (this is one reason why she got a short-haired dog like me!) and always forgets to groom me…I’m lucky if I get groomed twice a month, even though I am often bathed every week!

She is lucky though because I don’t need much grooming usually – mud will just fall off me when it dries and us Danes have a short single coat, so there are no matts or tangles! We are really easy “wash-and-wear” dogs! But once a year, I usually go through a big moult and lose a lot of hair from my coat. The dead hair that is coming out is very light-colured and makes my coat look really patchy…like I have some kind of disease! So at this time of year, Hsin-Yi can’t be so lazy and she has to groom me more often.

My humans use a Zoom Groom which has little rubber pins that pull out the dead hair. It also feels like a massage – really nice!

   

 

On Sunday, we had to get up really early because Paul was going to do a big walk in Cornwall Park called “Run 4 Mums“. This is partly to celebrate Mother’s Day and also to help collect money paper for The Nurture Foundation for Reproductive Research which is a charity that helps humans who cannot have babies or whose babies die before they are born.

Paul is a Human Vet who helps bring babies into the world and so he and other Human Vets who work with him were doing this to support the charity. Some people did the Run but Paul could only do the Walk because of his back sickness (after his operation last year, the Back Human Vet said that he is not allowed to run anymore). But that was OK because there were lots of other people doing the Walk too!

While we were waiting for him, lots of people and children came up to pat me and ask questions about me as usual…

Some of the parents were very silly and just let their children run up to me without asking Hsin-Yi first or letting me smell their hand first. I was OK because I am very well socialised with children but some dogs might get frightened if a human pup just ran up to them and tried to hug them – and then they might snap and wh0 can blame them!

Really – humans should teach their pups better manners so that accidents don’t happen…otherwise, us dogs always get blamed when it’s not our fault at all! Anyway, the human pups were all very sweet – even the one who kept hugging me and wouldn’t let go (sorry, Hsin-Yi was too busy supervising us to make sure we wouldn’t hurt each other so she didn’t get any photos!)

We were really pleased to see Paul when he finished. We also met some of his Human Vet friends – one of them was wearing a special “pregnancy belly” – this is a big heavy coat which helps people understand what it feels like to be a pregnant woman and how difficult it is to move everywhere!

It was very good of them to wear that and do the walk/run!

 

 

 

 

The best part of the day was when Paul went to get a hot dog for me…I wolfed it down so fast, Hsin-Yi didn’t even get a chance to get a picture of it!

Whew! I’m exhausted from my busy weekend…I need to get back to the working week so I can get some rest!!

Did you have as busy a weekend as me?