Our little protagonist started the day with disappointment, but he got over it.

When we went out for our morning whiz, Sparky wanted to look around a bit.  He locked on to something in the bushes at the top of the hill.  No surprise, he is always locking on to something.  He poked his head in, and flushed out a rabbit.

Every week or so, I put Sparky on the retractable leash to keep him familiar with it.  The rest of the time, he is on a 10 foot free leash.  I stopped using the brush anchor when it snowed, and may not go back to it.  Sparky doesn’t complain about dragging the anchor, but he isn’t so young anymore and not so prone to running off.  I am usually too permissive with Sparky, so will probably regret this.

Today, he was on the retractable leash.  When the bunny took off, I dropped the leash handle so Sparky could pursue.  He didn’t have a problem dragging the plastic handle at the end of 12 feet of leash.  When he cut around a tree, the handle momentum wrapped the leash around the trunk.  Sparky was captured.

That’s too bad, because it was a big rabbit that ran straight down the hill for a couple of hundred feet before cutting into the woods.  Sparky never would have caught the rabbit, but he would have enjoyed the exercise.  Sparky probably would have run into the woods with a free leash, then I might be looking for him for a half-hour, but that never occurs to me.

Sparky doesn’t seem to be blaming me as he wagged his tail on the way back to the house.  He might see this as a good sign that the rabbits are back for the spring.