In the past few weeks my whole family has been putting efforts forward to train our new puppy, really working on it to stop several of the bad misbehaviors that she has. And what we have learned is that she is a very intelligent animal, where at the very small age of three months she has already started picking up on several things. For instance, she will let us brush her now without biting at the brush, she has become better with the leash and will walk longer distances before putting up some resistance and fighting, and she has completely stopped biting all of us. Again, this is still a really young canine, so it is surprising how quickly she is picking up all of these things!
But there is one habit we cannot seem to break her of no matter how many different ways we try and no matter what amount of effort we put into it. You see, little Indigo has a fond love of the taste of fruits and will stop at nothing to eat any fruit she can get her paws on. At first it was strawberries that were obviously bad and other assortments of fruits we would toss into the garden to mulch. We stopped throwing those in there to stop her from eating them (plus we read online that strawberries are one of the worst things for a dog to eat). Then she started picking up cherries off the ground from the remains of our old cherry tree, which there would be no way for us to pick up all of the cherries. Fortunately, the cherry season ended and the birds pretty much pick the cherries clean, leaving Indigo with just the pits to indulge in and that was not the part she likes. So that stopped.
And then she moved on to the apple tree, which is currently still in full bloom with tons of apples as they turn from green to red. For reference, we know that there are more than five-hundred apples on the tree, a fact we discovered after picking up over three-hundred off the ground in a couple of days and still seeing tons more on the tree. Well, our little puppy learned very quickly that she likes apples and would run over to the tree and start searching the ground for the fruits. Usually we would see her run back from the area after successfully picking out one of the smashed apples off the ground and then she would start to munch on it. At first all we did was take away the fruit and throw it out, but she became smarter than that and started playing keep-away (a game which we cannot encourage, so we stopped chasing her). So the next best thing we could do was pick up all the smashed, rotten, and disgusting apples off the ground. To put these into retrospect, these are not the apples you buy at the store that look ripe and delicious. Instead, these are the underdeveloped remains of apples that the squirrels have picked off, taken a bite or two, and then tossed to the ground. They are covered in dirt and grime, bugs roaming all over their outer coating as they turn the sweet fruits into food, and something that most other animals would sniff at before walking away. And like I said, we have picked up hundreds of these to stop her from eating them. Side note, her favorites were the ones that were already smashed open and usually the ugliest, unhealthiest ones of the lot.
As soon as she became aware of the task that we were doing, the tossing of her delicious apple snacks, she also became smart enough to know she could just grab a few while we were picking them up and go munch on them quickly. So we would see her come over, grab one while we were taking dozens of them away, and then go to the center of our yard to eat them. But her learning did not stop there. Instead, as she started to realize that there were less and less apples each day for her to eat, she started grabbing what she could and then hiding them around the yard. She was stock-piling the apples from us, keeping a secret stash for later. We never found that secret stash, but we did continue to pick them up and off the ground.
Well, being the clever dog that she is, she has moved onto the next level of apple eating. Now not caring about the ones on the ground, she instead ventures right over to the tree and will get up on her hind legs and pluck one right off of the branches. And she seems to have a very peculiar taste too, always heading for exactly one instead of heading for the easiest pick. Sometimes, that means she will even have to jump up and grab one off of the tree. In honesty, watching her is quite impressive as she takes them down. Still, the main point is that if we do not want her eating the apples now, we will have to pluck every apple off of every branch up to approximately four feet or more. That is not going to happen. On thing that my Mom noted as we watched her was that at least she is getting better apples now, instead of the ones that have been in the dirt and covered with God knows what.
