Good morning everyone!
Happy Holidays to you all.
I just got another note and picture from Southwest about Sandy and thought I'd share them with you. They are taking excellent care of her. She's doing as well as can be expected and just as smart as ever. Beautiful too!
"Hi John and Liye! So sorry that you miss her. She's a unique little lady.
She's doing well. I believe she's adjusting to being in an enclosure, finally. She's figured out that if she jumps up on one of her houses she can see who's coming down the walkway in the nature center and this seems to have calmed her down. She didn't like not knowing what was coming her way and I can understand that.
We had a setback on the clicker training when she was frightened by some loud, careless people who happened by during one of our training sessions. It took a couple of months before she would consider focusing on it again and she blamed me and the hotdogs! So, we're learning. This last month she's forgiven me gradually and I get soft, sweet eyes again, and a tail wag.
She's been digging a den, but it's not going according to plan. Turns out that this enclosure doesn't have wire beneath it, but has deep footers around the outside, so she can work on a den on her own. She decided to dig beneath one of the houses and has managed, so far, only to make it teeter back and forth. So I square it up a bit and she digs and one of these days, she'll have a den.
Her enclosure is so full of toys that it's hard to clean and now Iv'e added a gigantic section of pine tree from a ponderosa pine which fell at our place up north. She's enjoying tearing the bark off of it. I had to recruit several large guys to get it in there it weighs a ton.
Oh, and you'll enjoy this. We feed frozen rabbits to our mountain lions at least once a week, but they're kind of expensive. Occasionally the rabbits are cut into smaller pieces and Iv'e been given permission to use some for Sandy. That may have been when she forgave me entirely for the previous unfortunate incident. She could hardly believe it the first time she got one. She looked at me and licked the rabbit and looked at me and finally wagged her tail off and took it behind her house. Before I left that day, she ran over and gave me a huge smile, before racing back to her rabbit piece. I may have to shop for rabbit meat for her just to see that smile.
Hope you all have a lovely holiday. Are you getting snow? I haven't gotten too many good pictures of her, but here's one that's not too blurry."
