Working Dog In The Garden

I bet I’ve got something y’all haven’t seen before!  Let me back up and explain.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve probably bought 100 bags of mulch, 50 bags of topsoil, and 50 bags of potting soil.  Needless to say, my back is getting a workout and I’m not getting any younger.  Today, I purchased another 10 bags of mulch, 10 bags of potting soil, and 4 bags of humus peat.  I dreaded unloading this from my truck, wheeling it to the backyard, then spreading it around the yard.  I tried to call my neighbor and see if his 12 year old son was interested in earning some extra money.  Nope, his son was busy.  So I wondered what I could do to make it easier to unload all this stuff and transfer it to the backyard.

Suddenly a light bulb went off in my head.  Sascha (my German Shepherd) is a working dog (both of her parents were working dogs in the Czech Republic) and she loves to have some type of task to do, so what if I put on her harness (previously used for protection training) and had her pull the mulch and soil into the backyard for me?  Sure, each bag of this stuff is 40lbs, and Sascha weighs around 80lbs, but it’s worth a try isn’t it?  I normally load 4 bags in the wheelbarrow so surely Sascha could pull a couple of those right?

I’ll now let the videos mostly speak for themselves.

In this first video I just put two bags of mulch in the cart since I wasn’t sure Sascha would even know what to do much less pull her entire body weight.

Okay, so on the first try Sascha got a little excited and ran over some rocks which knocked the cart over.  Did you notice her tail wagging?  I think she was starting to enjoy this.  Of course, so was Leecy who was laughing in the video.

On this second video clip, Sascha seems to be getting the hang of it.  She seemed to be real excited doing this work (as you can see when she jumps on me).  However, I made a slight mistake.  I should know that when Sascha is in “working mode” that is NOT the time to lose focus, or let her lose focus, which is exactly what I did and what she did.  If you watch the end of this video, as soon as Sascha jumps up on me, she (for whatever reason) took a little nip at my arm.  That’s the first time Sascha has ever bitten me and I view this instance as my fault.  She just got a little too excited and I didn’t keep her focused.

In this last video clip, you can see that Sascha is in the groove.  Her tail is wagging, her ears are down and she is very focused.  I don’t even have to really say much to her.  That’s Leecy at the end of the video clip saying “she must know where the divots are” as Sascha avoids the drainage line in the grass and instead goes around it.

During the last trip, Sascha was actually pulling 3 bags of mulch which is 120lbs.

So what do y’all think?  Pretty cool huh?

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