I recently wrote about a dog called Abner here. I lamented that I couldn’t really capture him in the photos I posted. As it happens, Abner was in a play group or three recently and I realized I had some video. I’ve said before that I’m not good at video. That’s still true. Plus, this video was clearly not shot to be with an Internet posting in mind. Still, the video below does a much better job of capturing one side of Abner than I could ever to do with my photos.

Notice I wrote “one side of Abner”.  A video is a representation of reality but not reality itself. One might think after viewing this that Abner plays all the time and moves with confidence through the world. And he is confident in the canine world. Less so in ours. But he’s getting there, and I have no doubt he will continue to grow into the dog he was meant to be.

Abner has what we call a Push & Pull play style. You can readily see how he goes in close, instigates, and runs away hoping that he will be chased. His play bites are gentle and I have rarely seen another dog react negatively to them. You can see one exception in this video starting at about 0:25. Abner goes in on Scrappy several times while Scrappy is trying to engage Charlie. Scrappy finally has enough and chases Abner off.

The way a dog moves is often a big factor in drawing my interest. Sometimes it’s a powerful running style but it could also be the slouching gait of an older dog. Abner I could watch forever when he’s moving around–especially when he’s playing. There’s something about the way he moves his head as he’s dancing around the field. Gosh, just a few more days before he goes home assuming he has a good meet with his future siblings. This is going to be tough.