With Gus feeling so good and the weather feeling so wintry, he’s still amped up each time we enter the arena and I remove his blanket. By trial and error, though, I’ve landed on a routine that mostly obviates obstreperous, obnoxious obloquy and opprobrium (see above).
The reason Gus was yawing off in all directions and flinging his head and being a general ass is that he’s brimming with energy: boy’s just gotta boogie and warm up.
If I lay a pole on the ground and include it in our circle, Gus happily trots over it; sometimes, he’s so up that he bounds over it as if it were two feet high. If I want to give him a wider circle, I can just walk a circle myself — or even better, I can trot my inner circle in pace with him, which makes him practically grin.
Full disclosure: what helps us succeed with our new lungeing protocol is a major barricade at the arena gate. First, I not only sling the tarp over the gate, but I also line up four plastic chairs in front of it, and I post friend Barbara there. When Gus yanks the lunge line out of my hand and rushes at the gate, she meets him with her fiercest glare and a big X of raised arms. Seeing the tangle of chairs and the shooing of Barbara, he veers and comes back to me. After that, I get him lungeing again (pausing for a click-and-treat the first time he passes near the gate and doesn’t consider charging it), and we end up trotting many circles in both directions with nary another glance at the exit. The next time, I line up the chairs but do not employ a border guard, and again Gus pulls away and barges toward the door, again realizes the chairs look too troublesome to breach, and again soon forgets all about trying to break out.
At last, we have a sane and safe method for warming up and getting some good exercise when cold weather makes Gus hot to trot.
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