Bear Dogs?

I visited a friend the other day, and he happened to have a fresh bearskin hanging. He kindly gave me a piece and a foot so I could see what my dogs would think about it. Here are the 45 day old pups on their first bear

Zen Collection

Just a little shout out to the Zen Collection. A good friend of mine, Angela Ortiz, is their brand ambassador. We've had some fun conversations over drinks about the project, and about the stories behind these amazing little bits of Japanese culture they are digging up for their collection.

All this stuff is made by traditional Japanese craftsmen, and as with the Nihon Ken, these beautiful pieces of Japanese culture are dying out with the artists crafting them. It behooves us to support the ones that are left.
http://www.zencollection.jp/

Singing With Wolves

Tell me this doesn't give you chills

Recycle

I use a wood stove to heat the cabin. I could buy a solid cast iron stove for 100,000 yen (maybe I'll make one at some point), but I use a flimsy thin burner known in Japan as a daruma stove. It only lasts a few years, but costs around 5000 yen. Theoretically I could keep burning through them for 20 years and I would finally have paid as much as I would have for a cast iron behemoth.

Anyway, I've used my current stove for 2 years, and rather than burning through, the top actually rusted out since I left a tea kettle on it constantly. So, since autumn's settling in it was time to clean the chimney and switch in a new stove.





What do we do with the old one? Recycle it into the coolest fern pot.





Don't throw it out, recycle lalalala

Baron x Tenko: 27 days old

So here are the girls. Everyone's growing nicely, and everyone is healthy. They're very mobile, coming out to do their business, and very eager to eat. Yesterday I saw Tenko regurgitate food for them for the first time.

Kuromasa x Chacha: 18 days old

The first three pictures are the larger female. Looks like she'll be a sesame, and the smaller female a red sesame.

More Monkeys

Woke up to the sound of monkey alarm chirps. This is the first time they've been on my property since I put in the loft windows.

I love it. Lying in bed and watching monkeys feeding and at play. If you look at the tails on these monkeys you may notice they are rather long. They're hybrids with Taiwanese monkeys that were released into the wild by some idiot. Why do people do things like that?

3.5 Weeks

I think my Shikoku pups are now larger than the Kishu pups. It could be a breed thing, or the fact that there's 5 Kishu pups and only 2 Shikoku, or they'll just be smaller dogs. Tenko is at @47cm and Chacha is 49cm and noticeably larger. Guess we'll see. Maybe I'll move one of the Kishu over with Chacha and see how that goes.

Growing

The pups are growing so fast. Keeping on top of keeping all the dogs healthy, socialized, keeping up on training for others, and then all the daily maintenance for so many dogs... fun, fun. But hey, that's what it takes to make the next generation, and the process is fun and worth the effort.

Hokkaido Puppies

Congratulations to the Hokkaido Association of North America on the first litter of Hokkaido pups born in North America.
https://hokkaidousa.wordpress.com
www.hokkaidoken.com
















Out of a brindle male and Black and Tan female they got a nice variety of color.

Monkey Business

When you're going after boar and run into a super troop of monkeys.

Rumor has it there are over 100 in this troop, and I counted over 60. I literally sat under the tree there for over 10 minutes watching them pass. Of course Baron and Masa had set them on the move. We were out looking for boar, and getting some hunt training (and a work out) for Masa.

This is the second time Masa's been out with me. The first time was a complete joke since he would only go uphill, and refused to go downhill. You can imagine how that went. Ahhh the joys of training new hunting dogs.