Today I spent about ~3 hours cuddling with my dog and I mean real cuddling, not only petting, which is weird because I got a stray dog from the killing station, so I thought this wouldn't be a dog who likes to cuddle and I would have been totally fine with that (I'm not the biggest cuddler either), but — turns out — he is, so we cuddle. Also he's NOT afraid of cars, bikes & elevators (I thought he definitely would be). Before the cuddling we visited our dog school for the second time and trained relaxed encounters between dogs together with 3 other human-dog-teams and our coach. It went pretty well.
Thistle tethered for safety :) She did so well I’m so proud of her! She didn’t break in the first few even though the other two strange dogs were really worked up and moving about/breaking behind her (they are new to this level! it was hard for them). She didn’t even break when they started tossing treats around her ! Solid out of sight drop n stay!
She DID break to catch the treat lobbed directly at her head but I think it was cheating because we spend SO MuCH TIME teaching her to catch treats from people as a relaxation bonding thing and tossed treats for her to catch is like my jackpot reward for SUPER work. So I’m just saying that was cheating ;)
AND she dropped on my disembodied voice telling her to, after she broke, so I think she should get points for an out of sight drop command ;)
Sits for exams!
Thistle sat while people came up and stood right next to her. One time it was a person either side, super high pressure and challenging! She was very concerned by this unusual behaviour but I marked and rewarded and she relaxed a little when nothing happened. She is not ready for the touchy touch, calm and relax first :) I am proud of her no breaking position, reacting or shutting down. Super good gal.
Loose lead walking!
Thistle is usually pretty good at LLW but today! TODAY! She was perfect! She was picture perfect it stood out to me so big that she was just chilling and swanning about. Every now and then she got concern wrinkles over the unknown terrier, very energetic dog, but she kept with me and didn’t freeze or pull towards it.
I think this unnaturally good LLW is in part due to all the walking practice in the DA social class, but I think also that she now has medication for big events. Of which training counts as such. It takes the edge off without sedating, but I think some of her blips in LLW when she pulls tends to comes from nerves. So with the nerves reduced her already p. good LLW became AMAZING.
Drops on formal recall
Didn’t even know she could do this? We have done distance drops and the odd movement drop but a drop on formal recall is not something I’ve done with Thistle, just Thyme. Observation learning? Nonetheless she was great and I tossed the drop marker away because she was doing fine.
She was doing great ignoring the other two dogs darting about as well :)
Recall from someone garnering attention
She was not so good at this, but then also again strong history of counterconditioning her to be interested in the trainers. I think she will get better at this when she understands the game of “they get ur attention, run back to mum on command and sit, get released for more attention n treats”.
Leave it from a stranger
Another challenging one, because she won’t take food from an utter stranger anyway. So it’s more like “leave it from someone you know and have a strong history being rewarded for taking food from”. This will be a very hard one to practice! Will also have to practice very carefully, do not want her to think she shouldn’t be taking treats from people. Very carefully to teach this one. e.g. if I say leave it too harshly, Thistle can react by getting alarmed and will then bark at the person. Got to build the correct behaviour and understanding for this slowly, carefully and thoughtfully. Hard for us both!
Thistle also said hello to many people she had not seen in awhile, and she side-eyed the new trainee trainers. They were all in raincoats so did not bother with those.
I notice her training jacket is looking really quite worse for wear. It is 4.5 years old with weekly use, but the words are starting to come off. Time for a new one. I don’t want to toss it though, as the jacket itself is fine just the words are coming off? I wonder if I can add new words to it somehow. Or post it back for new words to be attached.
Today we walked where our dog school used to be, now it’s supposed to be a parking lot for when there are Hokey competitions or something. I liked it better when it was dog school but still had a fun run with Human! We also went training different horses today and went voting because it was voting day in the Netherlands. Now I am tired on the couch. It was a nice spring day!
