Personal Trainer

If you need a personal trainer of the calorie-burning, gym-sort for your dog, get a Boxer. And when I write Boxer, I mean a dog like Lucy. She’s our house guest this week, while her owner “Food Guy” is in Europe.

Our two Bernese Mountain dogs generally enjoy a life of leisure with one or two moderate walks a day. When Lucy is here, it is like watching a drill sargent in action: she has DJ up and boxes him into submission and exhaustion within minutes. After that she trots, nay skips, over to one of two open wooden boxes where we keep dog toys and selects a toy as if she were a personal trainer picking out weights or medicine balls to shred her client’s muscles with. She brings the selected toy to panting DJ and I swear I can almost hear her grunt, “C’mon, let’s see what you got!”

At the end of the day, our dogs sleep soundly, slobberingly, and gratefully it seems. Lexa, the senior dog, perhaps grateful for a distracted and depleted puppy in training. And Lucy? Dreaming of the next round.