Havencon 2018! The good: I did a panel on service dogs this year again. Last year, only 7 or so people showed up including 3 of my friends. This year, 1/3-1/2 of the room was full! I was amazed! They asked really good questions! Were happy to learn. We had a meet and greet after with Peach, Larxene, and Kibeth. Everybody loved it! Kibeth also did something new! She responds to my anxiety by paying over my feet. This was a natural alert, shaped to be more consistent. She did her anxiety response and then mid-panel, she got up and started blocking for me. I didn’t even register it until my trainer, Tawsha mentioned it during the panel. 😭 I don’t deserve this sweet girl. She was excellent about blocking and keeping pace with me. She snuggled with everyone in the room off duty and was generally a good girl. We also went to a drag show, and a cosplay contest! Kibeth was kind of concerned by the clapping but we worked on that and by the end she was sleeping thru the clapping! Our friend also started making collars and vests and she gave us a pokeball vest! It matches Kibeth’s pokeball collar, and was a PERFECT ADDITION TO OUR POKÉMON TRAINER COSPLAY The bad: Kibeth barked. Twice. During my service dog panel, and during another panel. She has learned to bark/spook at the door bc Stitch, who barks at the door. It’s something I need to train out of both of them. I am mortified. But Tawsha was helping me find exactly what made her bark and why (it had caught me totally off guard). We’re currently working on it and proofing the behavior. So, there’s the bad. She has really improved on attention soliciting behaviors but I need to work even more on it. The ugly: Kibeth was unsure about something she saw and I was trying to refocus her, when another dog there suddenly barked at her. That shook her. It took her a minute to refocus. She then got spooked by some one in a fur suit (regardless of the fact I have socialized her around fur suits and worked with her really hard on that). So she was upset by that. But was totally fine later. When we went to the cosplay contest, lo and behold, we saw the dog that barked. It was directly in front of us. Kibeth eventually settled. The other dog did not. He was standing the whole time and stress panting, periodically whining as well, through out the entire contest. It’s handler had it on a flexi leash and was a cosplay contest judge. But it was a really good example of a dog who could have genuinely been a service dog, but was not prepared to cope with the environment.
