I wonder sometimes if I’m being more than a little naive when I start to think how smart my puppy seems to be. I mean, I really do think she’s smart, but I wonder if I’m giving her more credit than she deserves.

A couple of months ago we bought a medium sized bell. The kind that they sell in pet stores for large birds to play with in their cages. We brought the bell out and taught our puppy to touch it with her nose in order to make it ring. Once she got that down pat we attached the bell to the door handle and every time she had to go outside to relieve herself we got her to ring the bell.

Fast forward a couple of months to this week. Obviously the bell trick took a little bit of time, but she knows to ring it when she’s got to go outside to relieve herself. This week though, if I ask her if she’s got to go out to go pee or to go poop (one question at a time) she’ll go to the door and ring for whichever function she’s got to do.

Just to see if she was really answering my questions I told my husband what I’d been doing and got him to ask her one question at a time – ie “Do you have to pee? Show me?” or “Do you have to poo? Show me?” and she went to the door twice for the pee question and when she was taken outside that’s what she did.

I’ll test out my theory over the rest of the week, but I really do think she understands the questions. This of course is the puppy who used to try to fake a pee just to get a treat! That’s one reason why we ask her what she has to do before she goes out as we want to make sure she really has to do something and doesn’t just want to go outside.

So what do you think? Do I have a smart dog or what?

She’s getting bigger! Last week we had to take her to the vet and while we were there she was weighed and she’s over 50 lb now. Maybe she will get to be a decent size for a Lab instead of the runt that I thought she’d likely be due to her poor health when we got her.

We took her to the vet because we had suspected she was in heat for about two weeks, however she never did start to discharge any blood so I wondered if she had an infection instead. She was passing a bit of yellowish gunk. Unfortunately I was right. She has puppy vaginitis. The doctor put her on a sulfa combo antibiotic for a week, but now that she’s done her drug treatment I don’t think the infection is gone. We might have to wait for her to go into her first heat before it resolves.

Other than that her health is better than ever! We spent so many months medicating her that I almost thought I’d never be able to say that, but other than the yeast infection she currently has she seems to be in good health.

Have you had a pet that was sick that you had to worry over and give special care to in order to nurse it back to health? I used to do a lot of rescue work with reptiles and unfortunately I think I’ve done that with all the pets I’ve adopted and cared for. Hey, I’m a nurse … I guess it comes naturally.