11 Months and Piper has a home!

The pups are 11 months old today! Miles sister Piper has a home! Her new family lives on the beach and is coming to pick her up tomorrow. They have already adopted a greyhound from Greyhound Crossroads, our adoption group. They also have puppy experience with 2 whippet pups they raised. They got the horrible greyhound puppy speech anyway just to be safe but it didn't scare them off.

Piper is pretty good for a pup but has been a little more of a handful than the boys. Mainly because she was not raised here with our rules and also because of a few mistakes in her upbringing. We know she was left in her crate all day every day while her family was at work. No way a pup can hold it that long so it taught her NOT to hold it and to potty whenever she felt the urge. She is pretty good about covering it with blankets if she goes in her crate and really does do pretty good about not going in there most of the time. Fortunately she didn't lose the urge to be clean like so many dogs that stay in crates too long as puppies.

When Piper arrived she would go wherever she was when the urge hit though. She still has to be supervised but has gotten a lot better. It is obvious she had some supervision in the past, but just enough to train her to sneak out of the room to potty or even to watch to see if the human is watching her before going. Humans only get upset if they actually catch you in the act, after all. Pups learn that pretty fast if they are allowed too much freedom during potty training. Piper has finally learned to go in the grass/dirt outside instead of on the deck!! It took nearly a month of going out with her 5 times a day and making sure she went to the proper spot. I think she has a stubborn streak in her because she learns things very fast when she wants to.

Piper is an awfully sweet pup and obviously got a lot of affection from her previous owners. She snuggles as much as possible. She is very smart and quickly learned to "kennel up" on command and likes her kennel. She is usually quiet there unless we have company or are playing with the other dogs. She wants to be out to join in the fun then and may whine a bit to let you know. Piper learned how to sit, down and shake very fast and is very food motivated so would be easy to train to do just about any trick.

Piper hasn't been destructive except with stuffed animals. She takes them apart and removes all the stuffing. I made the mistake of putting a comforter in her crate for her to lay on instead of her usual blankets. She removed ALL the stuffing from the comforter in the couple of hours I was gone just like a big stuffed animal. My fault I should have thought about that with a puppy. My Italian Greyhound Pinky would do the same thing when he was a pup. I found out today that she chews rope toys apart strand by strand. It took me awhile to figure out what that big pile of what looked like string was when I found it in the back yard.

I weighed Piper today. I was pretty sure she had grown since I got her and she has. She weighed 40lbs. She doesn't look fatter so she must have gotten taller and longer like the boys. Piper can still walk under the boys and does frequently so hasn't gotten a lot taller. She was weighed at the vet a week or so before she arrived at my house and she was just 31lbs. The boys have put on less than 10 lbs in the last month I think. Ten pounds for Piper is a quarter of her body weight. The pups should really be about done growing by 11 months. The boys will probably still put on some muscle weight because of their hormones. Piper was spayed as a pup so her muscle will not increase.

Congratulations to the Lewis family for picking out such a sweet girl!