It’s still very hot, so I’m spending a lot of time indoors in the cool. I spend part of the day taking a nap, as the heat can be very tiring. I can’t play any of my favourite outdoor games during the day, so it’s nice to play a quiet game indoors with the cats or my bipeds.

Sometimes we play hide and seek, but mostly we play games that I can play without moving. Most games that require me to move very much have been declared outdoor games by my bipeds anyway! I’ll tell you more about some of those another time.

Mulberry, the cat, comes and plays with my tail sometimes. He’s always gentle, so I swish it back and forth for him. Occasionally he plays with my rope tug toy. I will take one end in my mouth and move it about for him to chase. He looks so cute doing that! We always stop if we see the bipeds pick up a camera, it’s really funny!

My bipeds sometimes balance treats on my nose or my paws and I wait until they say that I can take the treat. They also put treats near me in a pattern and tell me which one I can take – I always get them all in the end!

We play a game where I’m lying on the floor and they try to catch my front paws. I can move my paws around really quickly and sometimes I tuck them underneath me, so that they can’t touch them – that makes them laugh! If they touch my paws, they put both hands on top and we play a silly game where we pull the hand or paw out from the bottom of the pile of paws and hands and put it on the top. That means a different  paw or hand is on the bottom and needs moving to the top. We move our hands and paws faster and faster until the bipeds laugh and give me a hug.

Another game they play with me is to hold both hands out in front of them, closed in a fist, with a treat in one of them and say, “Which hand?” I sniff their hands and nudge the one that has the treat. I was quite a young puppy when we first played this. The first time we played, one of the bipeds put a piece of liver cake in one hand and held out both hands so that I couldn’t see which hand the treat was in. I didn’t know what I needed to do to get the treat, but the smell of the liver cake was enticing so I nudged the hand that held it to make it clear I wanted the treat.

I know that the first few times we played, they always made sure their hands were clean and they’d only touched the treat with the hand it was hidden in and it was always a treat with a strong smell. This made it easy for me to smell the treat and learn what they wanted me to do. They now try to make it much more difficult by handling the treat with both hands, but I always get it right. Although, it does become more difficult if we play for a while – they get more and more treat smell on their hands and I need to sniff both hands carefully to get it right. I really enjoy this game!

I’ve updated last week’s post about being safe in the heat so that some of the important points made in the comments don’t get missed.

See you next Wednesday!