Fiesty puppy

I ostensibly bought Reba to play with Newt, my little Shih Tzu. Poor Newt. She put up with Reba but it was clear almost immediately who was going to be running the show at our house. One of my favorite memories of Reba as a puppy was when I playing with the dogs inside one evening. Before Reba came along, every evening, I would play fetch with Newt in the hallway. I would toss her a tennis ball and she would run down the hallway, grab it and bring it back to me. Well, this game fascinated little Reba. Reba probably weighed 2 lbs and her mouth was tiny but she started chasing Newt as she ran after the ball and that kind of freaked Newt out. Newt started to run away from Reba who was hot on her heels. I was no help as I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. At this point, Newt jumped up on the couch with the ball knowing that Reba could not (yet) jump up on the couch. Little Reba jumped and jumped up at that couch barking and barking. I will never forget that moment of her "treeing" Newt on the living room couch. Go figure.

Well, it wasn't long before Reba figured out how to get that tennis ball in her mouth. Back in the early 90s there weren't tiny tennis balls (or I didn't know about them if there were), so she had to carry the regular size ball which was about the size of her head. She used to chew the fuzz to make a "handle" and then she carried the ball by its fuzz. Soon, she could out run Newt and get the tennis ball every time. Poor Newt soon gave up on her fun fetch game and would dejectedly sit in the next room. So, we bought Newt a small frisbee and taught her to fetch the frisbee and she was soon a happy girl again and for the next 10 years Newt happily fetched her frisbee while Reba compulsively chased tennis balls over and over again.