Puppy Meeting at the Girl Scouts

Photos by Barbara.  Text by Cheryl.

Last Thursday we had our puppy meeting during one of Troop 973's meeting in Old Harbor Bay.  It was quite a gathering.

These pups are training to help someone who can't see

Carolyn got us started off by telling the girls exactly what the job of a puppy raiser is.

Kudzu,  SIT!

For a while her puppy Carly listened. Then her puppy decided to take a break!  The girls thought that was too funny and it was a nice teachable moment for Carolyn to show what to do when your puppy gets the sillies.



Close your eyes and imagine what it would mean to you, if you couldn't see

As you can see from this photo, Carolyn ended up handing off her pup to Susan. After the talk we all broke up into groups of two (there were 9 pups and 18 girls). The girls were going to rotate around and meet as many pups as they could.

Karen has Liberty in a sit while two girl scouts
are sitting nearby to pet her.

Here is Liberty and Karen with two girl scouts.

Some of us did some obedience and had the girls watch that before we broke into petting.  

Lois and Bill have Charity doing some down stays for the girls.

Brian, Susan and Liz are standing with two of their girl scouts.

Black lab Andros  has two fans!

Coastie sitting beside two girl scout fans

There was something that happened that was kind of cute.  Some of us brought business cards for our puppies.  We got them for the walkathon.  Coach has his own for the blog.  Well, the girl scouts thought those cards were AMAZING!  They wanted one for each dog.  It became THE collectable.  It was really cute.

Karen and Lightning with Bob and Carly in the background.

After we met with the girl scouts, we showed them how to play puppy tic tac toe. It proved to be an interesting game as Coastie and Coach  are 13 and 11 months old, respectively, and not fixed and we have a couple of young lady pups who are nearing their "red tent" time! 

One of the black team pups does a down stay in his corner.  This might be Coach.

Jerry holds Thunder's leash as Liberty watches for Karen who is out of sight of the camera.

Stephanie is giving Coastie a stay command.  There are two black labs in their squares.  The girl scouts are watching.

Karen stands in Lightning's square.  There is a yellow pup behind her and a black pup in front of her.

An almost full board is achieved! 

In the end, it turned out to be a draw!  Those smart girl scouts. 8-)

We took some group shots and then the girls scouts did a really neat thing:

The girl scouts did their evening meeting end thing where they pass along a squeeze and a prayer. They were in a circle around us.

What was so cool, I thought, was that all the girls and their troop leaders circled us and the pups and then they did their closing ceremony.  They crossed arms, passed on a squeeze and a prayer for all the puppies to be successful and become guide dogs.  It was all very sweet.