Seeing cows!
The day after Rudy went home, Kate came for a visit. I worked with her a few times as a puppy and now she’s been with me for a week to work on better house manners and some retrieve foundations. She’s six months old but far bigger than Viktor!
I primarily only offer board and train for puppies -they tend to adapt to being in a new environment much easier than adult dogs and my dogs are more accepting of puppies coming into the house than other adult dogs. Kate is only six months old but is more nervous than I anticipated – it took about a day for her to eat treats reliably and 4 days to comfortably play and eat everywhere.
Every day we go to different places to expose her to the world, meet people, and practice various training tasks. Most of these trips are very short. Socialization is about exposure and good experiences (treats and toys), not just interaction. We’ve been to several different towns and parks, the training center, an agility trial, and the family farm (water play with Griffin!). We’ve seen ducks, geese, small kids, all kinds of dogs, bikes, skateboards, joggers, cows, horses, big tractors and tiny cars and strollers.
We spend a lot of time working on house manners. She’s learning she can be calm while people ignore her, that lying down will get more attention than jumping or biting, to resist temptations, and look to people for direction. During play sessions she’s been learning to chase the toy, drop the toy, and bring it back rather than just play on her own. It’s so tricky with young dogs – there is advice to crate them so they can’t hurt themselves or others, so they don’t practice unwanted behaviors, and to give the humans a break. Unfortunately that makes it harder when they are out – they’re so excited! I see this with Viktor and sometimes Griffin – if we have some long travel days he has a much harder time settling when we do get home, our busy weeks recently have resulted in Viktor sometimes needing an hour or two to ‘cool down’ out of the crate before he’s his more normal self.
Here’s a video of a down on verbal cue – note how she doesn’t need food to prompt her down – this process can happen quite quickly! We have added in some staying – which is helped by the sit staying work we’ve been doing for a week.
The short break gives her family some time off to not be as frustrated, Kate gets to learn new skills, and our next step is to apply them to her home environment. I expect her to try her old games for a short period of time – it worked before in that environment – but her family won’t have to spend as much time getting her responsive now that some of the challenging bigger steps have been passed.
It’s been fun to have a training puppy – especially one that matches the rest of my group! Blaze has had to stay home (I can only fit 4 crates in my van) but he’s mostly been good for his dog walkers and life will soon get back to ‘normal’. Five is fun, but I don’t want five of my own!