Originally Posted by
virginiarey
That may be best Judy, thanks! She is still doing great today, though she did peepee in the crate because I hadn't put her in the smaller crate until today.
What I'm going to try to do now is to set the alarm for 3 a.m. and take her out and see if that helps.
It's kinda creepy out this time of the morning for me, since we're in a rural area on two acres, and have had racoons, possums, and other critters here....the deer, we don't mind. I believe what got me concerned, is the man we bought Luna from. He has 120 acres (beautiful place), and has had to find, hunt down and kill a mountain lion that came too close to the house when the wife was outside, and she she saw it coming and took off indoors. He's had to kill and scare off wolves, and a bear on his property, so all this "excitement" kinda freaked me out! We went over to where he housed the puppies, and had to crossover this "walk over de plank" type setup, to get to the other side and open the locked door, where they were housed in a very large, solid, house-like chicken coop, that had the floor off the ground. All 10 pups were able to walk all around, lots of food, play,etc. and all very sweet, yet their poop/pee would fall to the bottom, which was at least 6 feet down or so, so they were not on dirt and had fresh, if you want to call it that, air, that easily went up through the grate that almost was the whole floor. Pretty cool setup for protection, but the pups didn't know what dirt or earth was. With all this protection, I had to ask further, and the man told us more......
He said that he and his wife are also doing rescue whenever the need came, from people either dumping their dogs somewhere close to his area and he happens to be able to "get to them" in time (I'll explain), or because they knew he and his wife took in animals to they would even call him and bring him their dogs, etc. and he would take them in and find homes for them. We were like, "wow, how nice", what a kind thing of them to do.
Then he went on informing us, that he also has had to come out, mostly at night, and shoot wolves off of his calves like 20 feet on the side of his of door, because they were out for a kill! That he's been out in the woods, many times with his guns, trying to find where the most excruciating screaming and the noise of some dog/cat getting ripped to shreds out there that had been caught by the wild wolves. He would try and get to them to save it, but most times, it was just too late! Lost dog posters would be placed by people on the poles around the area, and he said you just knew that the screaming and noise you heard the night before, was most likely that lost pet, getting ripped to shreds! At daylight, all he would find is remains only.
So, you can just imagine hearing that, along with my imagination, scared the out of me! Now, I can't help, but look towards the small portion of our woods in the backyard if it's dark outside, to see if there's anything there, just waiting, and me having to hightail my back inside should something come out! I'm from California, where you don't ever have to think about things like this, but here, it's different! So early hours or darkness are not going to be something I look forward to.
I had also asked him the reason why he was letting the pups go so early and he said because momma dog didn't want to feed them past 3 weeks, it was just too many of them for her. So momma dog was still allowed to stay in the coop area with them, but they had started on moistened puppy kibble/water earlier. So when we picked out our little Luna from the litter, she was one of two girls who were the smallest of 9 girls! She was the one that kept following us around all the time, so we had to have her!
Her parents..........were very large, mom was 90 pounds, but the father.....an all solid black, took the cake! We had never seen such a gorgeous sweet animal, extremely intimidating by his look, but that massive in size. Like a beast only missing his red contact lenses and you would have sworn that "IT" had come to take you away for all the bad things you've ever done!
I figured since we picked the smallest and a female at that, most likely she would never get really large...........now, I'm not so sure, time will tell.