Chatting about my oral vaccine cooperation training. Here's an unrelated Rory being woken up from an extremely tubular nap:
Where we're at on my goals (from memory, I haven't reread my written goals in a while)
🎊 Really solid and enthusiastic chin rest. Great duration, I can poke all her teeth and rub her gums and she still comes back pumped for the next rep. I need to decontextualize it from my living room, I don't think I've ever asked for a chin rest outside of the house.
🎊 Will mouth the syringe! Not consistently yet (50/50) and I need to build duration because it's just a quick chomp. I got lucky with my marker timing and ended the session on that so I'm gonna let latent learning do its thing and come back to this later in spay recovery.
🎊 Actually maintained two visits in public per week since I made that original post! This was a fluke because Rory had two vet appointments (consult and bloodwork) and I went to two pet stores. There's no way I'm keeping this up.
🎊 This one is a bonus but we got a ton of positive interactions at the vet office. Everyone loves Arory.
🎊 I added in two new steps to my baby-steps-training: chin rest while I move the syringe towards you, and there's liquid in here. First one is self-explanatory, I just started waving the syringe around tonight and there were no issues. I'll move it towards her next session. Second one, I don't think she understands what a syringe does. I let her watch me squirt goop into my hand for her to lick. I think this is gonna encourage her to mouth too.
This training program took the backburner, to be honest. I've really been focusing on my conditioning program and gundog exercises and those take up my allocated daily time. Still, I'm pleased with where we're at. I think switching to this new fear free vet clinic is gonna make my oral vaccine sitch way easier but here are my new goals:
🥫 Keep working in public, beloathed. My anxiety does not help Rory and we both need to work through it. I think once a week is a reasonable goal, I have a few more vet appointments and then I can do stores again.
🥫Keep capturing the mouthing and build duration and movement.
🥫Work up to giving Rory some goop from the syringe.
After that is just putting it all together and practicing so I think we're doing good!
