Heeling and Formal obedience

Lateral movements and cone-to-cone. Focusing while sitting at heel is insanely boring, by Fenris’ standards, but we got up to 13 seconds. He has been really tired this week, so he kept checking out of the process when we worked on the cones. Some clicking for nose up. Only done one sideways session; he did some nice side stepping with his front paws off and on a raised tile.

Home Obedience and Steps to Success

Focus – outside twice 4 sec, then he put on his Good Boi pants and gave me 5, and then 6. (There was an obvious change of attention.) Focus with visible treat, same.

Distance/ Jump – 80% of the Jump lesson (adding height, distance) was done in a single 5 min session. This is fun! All we have left to do is generalise to other places, outside, and angle the jump more. Tried Go’round on an item outside, and we obviously need to put in some generalising on that too. Managed a chair outside.

Lazy Leash – Great improvement lately. We walk nicely together most of the way, he is rarely pulling – in any direction – and when he stops to sniff, I usually stop too. We have worked on the pay attention after treat thing, and our next step is to work on the Zen-ish behaviour of doing it around minor temptations.

Trick training

Oh my goodness – that was an actual, conscious jump over my leg, away from a wall/barrier! And we got our diploma, and when sitting on a mat I got a very nice High Ten (both paws up).

Social

Exhausted after last weekend – he even chose to skip his midmorning walk Monday, and nap instead, and slept most of Tuesday too.

Rally social training

Wednesday night. He did pretty well, considering the horrible weather. In fact in one area he had remarkable improvement since the last time we were there; when we first arrived, he only rushed to sniff for a handful of minutes before being aware of my presence. Instead of taking 10-15-20 minutes of almost dragging me off my feet, he listened to cues within less than five minutes.

Still distracted about people and dogs, of course, but it makes it a bit less of a hassle to go out and get the training in.

Also he flirted with a little spaniel lady who broke loose from her agility training at the other end of the field. I was very happy to be able to tell her owner that he was castrated. (And I was super-happy that he does NOT react to people when dogs are present, so he paid zero attention to the person running up to us to pick up the little lady!)

A bit worried about the camera woman approaching us though, so I put him away first, before getting my phone back.

Worked some tiny recalls as well, just the length of the lead with ham as payment. Serious distractions, but he did well.

He has shown me he can do Come to Heel in such an environment, and there are several of the signs that I only reward with praise and small talk. The slow is surprisingly good. (And then I hold the piece of ham over his nose for both the sit-stay and the triple sit… Can’t all be winners!) The misstep of the slalom is my own fault for not giving him enough space.

Future work: some dog-less training to get my own body cues under control, work on transitions from sits to movement, general focus under distraction.