Copper has an on-off switch. Two positions: full speed ahead and sleep soundly.
Even when she’s being “bad,” stealing sox or slippers and playing keep away with anything she knows I want back, it’s all about having fun. Humans should be so free. Vizslas don’t fully mature until four or five. At four, she still has some of her puppy perspective. She is smart, strong-willed, and just charming enough to get her way…too often. Playful would be a monumental understatement.
Copper was only a few months old when we took her with us to visit friends staying near La Paz, Baja Del Sur, Mexico, four years ago. There, we drove to a deserted beach, planning to introduce her to water. La Paz faces east on the Sea of Cortez. The surf is very small. I waded out to coax Copper in hopes she would learn to swim. Immediately she swam right out to me, circled, and then swam back to shore, looking bewildered, yet excited. All I had to do was call her and she repeated the feat, over and over again. At 6 months, she had more to learn about swimming, but her unbounded energy and enthusiasm guaranteed success. Today, she is an accomplished surf-dog who loves playing in the surf as I did as a kid on the California coast so many decades before. (More on that in a later post.)
We were stunned to realize how much Copper loves to run. Each day while in La Paz, we took Copper to a deserted beach. Cynde and I would separate by about 50 or 75 yards along the shore and called her back and forth. We thought she would never tire. Finally, she sat down and looked in both directions as if to say, “Okay, guys, that’s it for me.”
In a couple of minutes, she was back at it. Right then we decided that taking her on walks around the neighborhood as we had done before the trip, was clearly not adequate to her running needs. She is, after all, a Vizsla, a field dog with remarkable energy and endurance.
We take Copper to the dog park daily, even twice a day for the first few months, just to help burn off all that energy having fun. Copper easily learned to socialize with the other dogs and relished the appearance of other puppies with whom she could wrestle and chase. At the dog park, we would learn much more about dog social life and the humans who “own” them than we ever could have imagined.
The dog park has a way of bringing out the best and worst in people (mostly the best), highlighting the human dilemmas that make it so difficult to face both interpersonal and global crises. New revelations about the joy of dog awaited her two-footed companions at the dog park.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 