Labrador Retrievers, my best friends

I have had Labs in my life for the last three decades and they have given me nothing but loyalty, love and absolute pleasure. I have watched them around my children and around my grandchildren, the eye prodding hair pulling and general climbing all over that they tolerate is saintly, it takes a huge amount of torture before they will move off to lie somewhere else. And even then they will do this without a moan.
These lovely animals will help you look after your baby as well, and probably more conscientiously than any paid baby sitter will. They are very intelligent animals, they can see when a baby is crawling into a dangerous situation, and head them off, I have seen this happen time and again. For dogs that have as much energy as they do, they have an amazing amount of patience and understanding around crawling babies.
Probably the only drawback to this beautiful dog is the fact that it is not a very good watchdog, it will warn you when there is someone outside, but that is as far as its watchdog abilities go. There is no way that it will attack anyone, it is just not in this dog’s nature to do so. I do think that if someone attacked me or my wife in front of any of the Labs that we have had, they would try to protect us, and being big dogs, they would more than likely do so fairly successfully but I would still not be taking any of them into battle with me.
Food is the drug of choice for Labs, they are called stomachs on legs for a reason. These animals are permanently hungry, they will eat almost anything, handy when you are peeling veggies, you don’t need a bin, in fact the peel doesn’t even get a chance to hit the ground. My Labs have all loved things like pumpkin pips or squash pips and potato peels. They tend to eat very fast, and I do mean very fast. One afternoon, I needed to go out in the car at about the same time as their supper time, so I decided to feed them before going out. At this point I need to explain that our one Lab at the time, Fred, loved going in the car with me whenever I went out. To get from our back door to the side gate leading to our driveway is about 12 paces, I put his food down at the back door, and walked straight to the gate , intending to use the opportunity to leave because for some reason I could not take him with me this time. He beat me to the gate having finished his normal bowl of food in passing. (don’t worry I didn’t believe it either). As a Lab owner you need to watch a Lab’s weight. Because of their propensity for food, if they don’t get the exercise that they need, they get fat really fast.
A Labrador’s favourite game is fetch, if you are willing to throw the ball all day, they are eager to fetch it all day. They don’t always want to give it back to you once they have retrieved it, part of the game is sometimes for you to have to get the ball from it rather than it giving the ball to you. Labs as I have said are extremely intelligent, and that means that they often make up new games as we go along (all of my Labs have done this), and don’t think that they will forget the new game. Once made up it stays in the repertoire forever.
Labs are simply the best friends possible, it might be possible to equal them, but you will never be able to better them.