The Office Doggo, the BorkCorp contest, the Kong Bear & Disappearing Dreams

Markus gift from BorkCorp arrived and it’s a Shiba-print tote bag!

Raising Markus is the series where we share stories about our time raising Markus. Said to be aggressive and having gone unadopted for over a year, Raising Markus is the story of a rescued dog from Korea given a second opportunity, now in Vancouver, Canada. This series will include the lessons, joys and struggles of dog owners fumbling our way through our first adoption. The hope is that if you're considering rescuing a dog of your own, our stories are useful to you.

This week, we got to bring Markus into the office for a full day of work, we won an Instagram contest, giving and then quickly taking away the Kong Bear and Markus' inability to catch things.

The Office Doggo

Markus lying on a couch at the office. Borking hard or hardly borking?

A few updates ago, I mentioned how I had brought Markus into my office to meet my coworkers. He did well in new surroundings and meeting new people. This past week, we took that up a notch by bringing Markus into the office for an entire day at my wife’s office. We were nervous, but also excited for Markus to be out of the house with us for an entire day. If this worked out, it's an extra level of stimulation that we can introduce into Markus' life. It’s also great to be able to bring a dog to the work place because it gives us new options for looking after Markus.

And Markus was great. For the most part, Markus slept on the carpet at the office, which is basically what he does when he's at home anyways. He was great with people coming over to greet him and he gradually got more and more comfortable with the space. Throughout the day, he expanded his territory and wandered further away from Pammy. It was like he was testing to see how far he could go, but it was great to see Markus finally earning his own dog money as the new Chief Bark-eting Officer!

There was one small moment where Markus started barking out loud. While he was sleeping, somebody who was overly excited to meet him came over and startled him in his sleep and he woke up defensive and barking. Aside from that moment, Markus was very calm in the office and it gave us the confidence to keep bringing him in since it is exposure to more people and environments.

By the end of the day, Markus was pretty tired and slept well that night. It’s good to see him tired and sleeping well after a long day of sleeping at work!

The BorkCorp Contest

Markus opening his package from BorkCorp

We entered ourselves into a random contest on Instagram held by BorkCorp. It's one of those contests where you put your handle in and they randomly picked one and we just happened to be the winners this time! The package finally arrived this week and the prize was a cute mini tote bag with a Shiba Inu print. Markus was excited to open the package by himself!

The Kong Bear

Markus posing with his new Kong Bear toy

We've had our fair share of Kong products and have written reviews for them too. Certainly, if you’ve read those, you’ll know that we've been fans of their products in the past. They have a reputation for making toys that are hard to destroy and Markus is a destructive dog, which is why we like the Kong line of toys so much. Typically made of solid rubber, their toys are difficult and near impossible to destroy, but because it’s rubber, Markus doesn’t usually choose them out of the box. He tends to pick out the softer plushy toys, which are way too easy to destroy. We saw the Kong Bear and we liked the concept of it because it's a regular bear that’s stuffed with knots of rope inside. This bear was built to be tough to destroy,

When we finally allowed him to play with the Kong Bear, it lasted for about 20 minutes! By then, Markus had already taken the limbs off and untangled the rope from within. At that point, we needed to take it away from him and toss it out because it wasn't safe to play with anymore. For the price that we paid and with the Kong name, we hoped to have a little more playing time with this toy. We've had other rope toys that were a fraction of the cost that have lasted longer.

Oh well.

Markus, not a wide receiver

As part of a new trick, we've been playing catch with Markus by tossing treats to him. I guess no one's really ever played with Markus in this way before because he has a really poor catching ability! The first few times, he didn't know what was happening and the treat would just hit him on the head or shank off his snout (you can't say it's our tossing) or go right over his head. Once he started to figure out that the treats were coming at him through the air, he started to try and catch them in his mouth and he was so bad at it.

Markus would keep his eye on the treats and then lose sight of it at the past second and it would either hit him again or land behind him. A few times, it would hit his mouth and still manage to fall out. He managed to catch a few in his mouth, but it was probably at a 1/10 catch rate. Still, considering he only caught one and still managed to get lots of treats out of it, that's not a bad day of work.

We're going to keep working with Markus on this trick and improving his catch rate, but needless to say, Markus' dreams of being the next Air Bud's probably not going to fly at this point!

We’re so grateful for your support of The Markus Project. We mostly choose our locations through searching and word of mouth. If you know of a park, trail or location you think we should check out, please share it with us. We’d love to know!