Please Don't Eat The Daisies

Here's how it starts. The door to the room gets opened but by then they are already up and waiting for me to make an appearance however not making any noise. Once the door is opened and I step in the noise starts. It's mostly whining and an occassional frustrated bark. If I don't get a move on they increase the volume. It changes pitch when I put the food down and they now know the moment is near. Once the food is down I uplatch the top clip and then the bpottom - if you do it the other way they push against the panel and start to squeeze out.

Once I open the gate - or rather it's wrenched out of my hands - The Flood streams out of the pen. Generally they are tumbling out over top of each other like a wave. It's remarkable. Occasionally someone gets trampled but jumps up right away to continue the short journey to the dishes. Mostly they over shoot the food and end up having to do an about face. They then scramble for position and settle in to eat.

It's the eating that is most fascinating because of how they organize themselves. For some reason they pretty well eat a dish at a time. One or two puppies will stray to another dish but the majority stay at the same dish and eat til it's clean. That done they snuffle around looking for the next dish and so the same thing there. It seems to be a competition thing that makes me wonder whether this is the reason they are such rabid eaters as adults - they grew up with someone next to them always trying to eat the same piece of food.

Once the immediate hunger is sated they then start looking for somewhere to pee. This is where I step in and once they wander a short way from the dishes with noses to the ground I pick them up and pop them into the pen and they pee almost immediately. The same applies to the pooping but I'm less obsessive about getting them into the pen to poop because it makes far less mess when they stomp through it. They can track pee for miles.

It seems to be a universal law of puppy that once you have peed every other puppy is magnetically drawn to the puddle and at least two feet must touch the pee at least once - preferably more than once - and then tracked as far away as possible.

Lastly we have a demonstration of what a horde of 12 puppies looks like when it's chasing you. It seems cute ... but can be quite alarming when you turn around to look.