Pets afloat

Mack, Mack, Johnson, Carrot. See it? Good boy. Yes, we have a new crew member on board, Mack, the border Terrier puppy. So this episode of the Water Rd is all about having pets afloat. We'll be hearing about the lengths you sometimes have to go to to get your cat to come back home. There's all sorts of tricks that people suggest, like if you're a lady hanging your bra outside so your scent is actually in the air. And we'll discover that it's possible to have more unusual animals on board as well.

The nose turns head when you're walking up and down the toe path as well. It's it's a good conversation start. Lots of people stop and wonder what we're doing, walking and talking this with the top animal. Welcome to the Water Rd.

Well, Mac is named after the Macclesfield Canal because that's where we were when we found the litter, went to choose him and brought him home. He joined us at 8 weeks old. I think it's fair to say that having a puppy on board has been harder work than we expected. When you're on a boat you don't have a garden to let them out in and when you're moving all the time, every new place is exciting. All the advice on toilet training, for example, says they should use the same place all the time. That's impossible when you're constantly cruising.

Now puppy training isn't really about teaching the dog what to do, it's about teaching the owners. And a friend recommended a trainer in Bollington on the Macclesfield Canal who gave us valuable advice on what to do

with Cal Thorpe from Off Leash Dog Training. And you've been helping us with Mac because he's been a bit of a handful. In your experience, are we alone in finding that it's very hard work having a puppy? No, puppies are horrible, quite frankly. Bitey little messes and not very nice. What's the secret then? What do you have to do to make them a nice puppy? Good breeder first and foremost for finding the right breeder for the right dog, for the right people instead of, oh, that one's pretty, I'm going to have that one.

So you want to look for a decent breeder who's got decent lines, who's not just after the money for the puppy. Then it's making sure that you've got really good sleep patterns so that your dog learns what to do, when to do it, and loads of redirecting onto things you want them to bite instead of your legs. Obviously we're living on a boat. You've come to the boat to do a couple of sessions with Mac. Do you think it's easier or harder being on a boat? Much harder. You've got restricted space so therefore you've not got places where you can put him for sleep out of the way, so he's always got distractions of things moving around.

You've got no garden so toilet training is an absolute nightmare for you is when you first start your risk of everything is highlighted so over friendliness with other dogs when they're going past. So you're doing too much socialisation and literally making things just more which can make matters worse later on. So especially with our terrier breeds, what are really quite choose. Choose your world carefully.

Terrorists. So they want to be biting a lot of things and chewing a lot of things because that's what their design is and that's what their make up is. So for me, when you're living at the side of the boat or living on the boat, you're much more exposed to lots of different things than people are in houses because you're going to have wildlife right on your doorstep no matter what. Plus sometimes impolite people and impolite dogs. So we've got to make sure he's properly trained is what you're saying really, isn't it?

Yes, but I think that with every dog, it's just your circumstances are going to be a little bit tougher because you're literally contained in a barrel. Literally. It's a very pretty one, but you've got less space for doing things that you would normally be able to do in a 2 up to down. The exact same goes for people who've got too much room. So when I go to people's houses that have got like 10 bedrooms and things like that, they've got too much space. So the dog does too much naughty business. So like the toilet in on the other side of the mansion, darling.

So in some ways a smaller for toilet training's easier, but for a bigger area it can be even harder. But for you guys, I think the quietness of your boat is the hardest bit because as soon as you walk to your kitchen, they're disturbed. But he's going to have a really good sleep pattern because you're putting it in. And hopefully he's going to really enjoy that life, isn't he? Don't you think? Yes, yeah, I'm coming with you. He is going to have a really good life on the boat. You're just going to work on it always.

While dogs are certainly the most popular pet among boaters, there are also quite a few cats. Some of them are indoor cats, but others are allowed out, which opens up new challenges. I spoke to Pip from Narrowboat Oliana about Tilly, who's been a boat cat for 10 years. So Pip, obviously we've now got a dog and dogs are trainable, whereas cats are notoriously independent minded, aren't they? So how does that work on a boat? When Tilly came to live with us when she was four months old, we sort of had some ground rules straight away.

We'd we my old cat had moved on board with us when we first moved to live on board boat and Houdini been sort of she was an old cat. So we didn't have a cat flap or anything like that. And we decided to keep the same sort of rules for telly. So once her evening meals down, she can't go out etcetera. So she comes back for her food and and then doesn't expect to go back out again. She actually thinks that she should sleep with us rather than be alive at night and running around the world. She comes home for dreamies.

Thank you for coming home, Dreamies, which is the best bit about whenever she comes in the boat, she gets dreamies as a reward. We ring a bell whenever we feed her, a little like reception bell, and we call food time Ding, Ding time because it's Ding Ding. And that was something that somebody suggested online at one point. That would mean that if your cat's outside, you could ring the bell and they'd come running home for some food. Tilly just lifts her head and goes, alright, OK, But if she's busy outside, she's busy.

Some days I can go outside and call for her and she'll come straight away. Other times if she's busy with finding friends, etcetera, you have to be very patient and go keep going back outside to call for her. There's all sorts of tricks that people suggest, like if you're a lady hanging your bra outside so your scent is actually in the air and their litter tray, which is always a problem if you just cleaned the litter tray. So it sounds as though you're saying that cats can be kind of trained in a sort of way.

In a sort of way, not like a dog, which is like sit, lie down, etcetera. I suspect we're as trained as much as she is, as in we give her the dreamies whenever she comes home. We started it so it's our fault and we have to open and close doors because we have no cat flap. So are there other considerations then that you have to bear in mind, like if you're more up somewhere? Yeah, we we choose where we more. You can't always choose a really good place to mow for a cat. So we wouldn't mow next to a busy Rd unless there's no choice.

Near a fast running river. Maybe not ice. No, she wouldn't be allowed out because she'd want to walk on the ice if there's duckweed across the canal. Tilly's first ever swim was at Selby Basin when she went out. Looked. She normally looks to which side the towpath is. And yes, Tilly, we're talking about you. And she looked at the grass and thought it was great and went for a swim and swam the full length of our 60 foot boat. We do a quick cap and health and safety. And she has a whole series of ratings for different moorings, doesn't she?

She does. She has the Tilly stamp of approval and she also has names for places like Birmingham isn't Birmingham. Birmingham is Bombingham because it's pants. It's not very good for cats. She goes out in Birmingham in the middle of Birmingham near the Sea Life Centre, but it's bricks and a few shrubs so that gets a a bum mark. And but if it's somewhere really good where there's good hunting, good trees to climb, she loves climbing trees, then it gets a Tilly stamp of approval that goes on our. Blog and you mentioned the hunting for friends as you call them.

Have any of those made it onto the boat? Yes, we have had a few. Every now and again we get mice. We tend to be a boat that has doors closed most of the time so she can't bring them in. We did once have a baby rabbit brought in that on our previous boat to Oliana and she brought it in through the front door. I didn't know what it was in her mouth to start off with and I slammed the door in front of her, the bathroom door, which of course has a little air vent at the bottom and the rabbit managed to get under the door but she couldn't.

So we did manage to rescue this baby rabbit and kept her inside whilst the baby ran. Rabbit bobbed back to it's Warren or whatever, and then she sat by the Bunny hole for the rest of the day, waiting for another one.

And it's not just cats and dogs. We've seen boats with parrots and other birds on board and there was a boat at the Crick Boat Show a year or two ago which had a built in rabbit cage in its saloon. And Gemma and Jack have a border Terrier called Goblin who's a year older than Mac and a 7 year old tortoise called Tea Cake. They live on a wide beam boat in Skipton in North Yorkshire and have a mooring with a garden that they use in the winter. I started by asking them what we could expect over the next year with a border Terrier.

It's a wild ride. We have our ups and downs with him, don't we? Yeah, he's, he's got a sixth sense for chaos. I was just saying the other day to Gemma, you can't really have a terrier without becoming a little bit terrier. You just got to kind of roll with the chaos a little bit. And yeah, make what you will of it. He's literally the best thing that we've ever done though, like he's just completed our little family on this boat as a name and he's settled in so well. Do you think having the garden helps with with having the having the pets?

Oh 100% yeah we last. I mean because we've only done 1 summer with with Goblin. We realised when we came back here how easy it is just to kind of let him out in the garden for a run around. Whereas on the tour path I would imagine it's very similar to living in a flat, isn't it? You've got to kind of go out with them and it's a walk every time they need to go out, especially puppy times. That was every time. Like as we were training him, we had to put his harness and his lead on every time we let him out to use the loo.

And how do the two of them get on together? Because it's a bit of an old mix, isn't it? A border terrier and a tortoise. Yeah, they didn't really have a choice, did they? Tea Cake was hibernating when we got Goblin as a pup. So Goblin had about. Did he have about a month? Yeah, just to settle in and. Without him. And then we woke Tea Cake up and I think he was just like, what? What is this? And last winter they got on so well, didn't they? They. Yeah, we had broken heating last winter, so they were kind of just buddied up by the fire and I think it was a a kind of a relationship built on stress really.

If they were going to be warm, they had to put up with each other. That soon changed once it was fixed though. T Cake has absolutely re established the hierarchy. So people might imagine that a tortoise is easier to manage than a dog or. But has T Cake had his moments? Yeah, from last year didn't. He, yeah, we've had plenty of moments with that little, little shell boy. He last year, we lost him for 10 days. Yeah, we were on our mooring. Bit of a strange story really. You were doing some gardening and Yorkshire be in Yorkshire, some pigs got out of the farm up at the top and Gemma's natural Yorkshire instincts kicked in and she went to Herdham back into the field and thought TK won't go very far, he's only slow and then came down and he was gone.

And normally, like, we'll stick like a pom pom or something on his shell or like a little flag or something so we can see him in the grass. And I hadn't done that day. And then when it came back about 20 minutes later, I was like, oh, no, but he's gone missing before. And we've kind of just thought, oh, I'll turn up, we'll find him. He's usually in the same bushes every time. And then I had to go to work. And then we knew when it got to kind of overnight that we might not be finding him here. We had all kinds of people come and search for him.

And then we had. 4 labradors come and try and sniff him. Oh yeah. We had some trained Labradors of our friends who sniff and search dogs. They came and tried to look for him, but ended up just jumping in the canal. So that wasn't very, that wasn't very productive. But then we came back from a walk and we were just walking over the canal bridge and just out of the corner of my eye I just saw him just swarming through the field. With a little scheme of geese behind. Him. Yeah, in with all the Canadian geese.

He's. Got a little, you know the tiles that you put on your keys so you can find your keys a little. Tracker. So we just blue tack that to him when he's outside so we can ring him if he goes missing. The other problem with him is as well is that we've raised him to, I don't know how we'd manage this, but he'll only eat Pak choy and he'll only eat hand fed Pak choy. He won't eat off his own accord. You imagine them being so plain and quite boring really, but they're so emotive at tortoises. They just, yeah, he's really got a sass about him.

And he's he's, if he wants to be demanding, he'll make himself known. Don't get a tortoise if you think it's an easy animal. It's not, especially on a boat. When we bought the boat, we didn't really understand battery banks so much. We'd lived on a van, we knew about 240 and 12 Volt and etcetera, but we didn't really understand the the full in and outs of conserving electric and what uses what. So when we moved him onto the boat, he's obviously got a really high energy that needs to be on for like 12-30 hours a day.

So we just rinsed our first battery bank just by using a tortoise lab. Probably cost us about £600 in leisure batteries until we got educated and solar panels. So it's much better now. So finally we've got any advice for us to get through the first year with a border puppy. Lots of puzzles, like you can't get out every day, obviously we walk him and whatnot, but so I'd say just about every day we set him a little blanket puzzle and like we do a lot of sniff training around the boat and hiding things and just keep him entertained, Yeah.

Yeah, it's all breed specific, isn't it? Because the, the sniffing and ratting dogs, we do a lot of stuff to kind of keep him enriched and keep his brain active. I think just ride the wave. We've had a, I've had a terrible week with him this week. He's been a nightmare, running off after everything and anything. But then we've just take, we've just come back from the beach with him this afternoon and he's been beautiful. He's been such a good boy on the beach, so he's restored my face. Terry's being Terry as they just love novelty as well though, and when you're moving on every couple of weeks and you know, you go from village to village and he's got somewhere new to explore, he's just comes into his own.

He's just the happiest creature you'll ever meet. You can follow Gemma, Jack, TK and Goblin on Instagram at our floating house Tip Make and Tilly the cat have a blog. mollyanna.co.uk Cal Thorpe is off leash dogtraining.co.uk or find her at Wolfington's in Bollington and Mac is on Instagram at Mac The boating border. And that's all for this episode of the Water Rd. Next time we'll still be on the Macclesfield Canal, exploring the Middlewood Way, The Walking and cycle path that runs alongside part of the canal using the bed of a former railway.

I'm really pleased with how the community are involved, how they get together, how many people know each other, walk with each other and meet each other, go out for drinks together, you know, and it's all because they meet on the middle way. The Water Rd is produced and presented by me, Adam Porter. Don't forget to follow or subscribe so you're alerted when new episodes are published and all previous episodes are always available to listen to wherever you get your podcasts from. Thank you for listening to The Water Rd.

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