Second Session

Michael saw my distraught blog posts and called me in for another training session. This time, we're addressing the biting with a correction instead of treating it as a non-issue. My pain tolerance is not high enough to ignore it. I must say, though this is a band-aid solution to my overall leadership problem, the band-aid gives me the much needed room to work on the other issues.

The theme of my training is still building value in me. I seem to be not very good at this. It's like those relationships in high school, where you lose if you like them more. I definitely like her more right now, but I'm working to change that. 

Two things in particular that I'm working on are NILF and attention when walking.

I'm having a little trouble with NILF because though I understand the general concept of having the dog work for everything, and having the dog understand that I control all resources, I'm having a hard time translating it into dog language. Some of the things I do are easily recaptured in another light when Michael looks at them, and then they seem not so clever at all. So I guess, though it is an organic and adaptive way of life, I still need more guidance to establish familiarity with some patterns before I can make my own decisions, and have these decisions be RIGHT.

Attention when walking is going well for me, mainly because it's something  that I fully understand the purpose for, and know the criteria I want to eventually achieve with puppy - her being aware of me when I walk. We're making slow and steady progress, and I have fun working on this portion of our training, so hurray!!

On a recent walk around my Toronto home, we heard dinging at a construction site, Puppy showed curiosity, so I walked her over.

 

I've been sick this past week, high fever and hacking cough, but I caught a break yesterday and took puppy out. We went to the big field next to the dog park to work on interacting with her when she comes with me, with the added bonus of desensitizing her to dogs. She still barks at dogs she sees on the streets, but the distance we were standing at got no response from her. I will stay at that distance because I mainly want to use the field to gain engagement with her.

Little black dots in the distance are dogs.

Got her a new crate last week, she then had TERRIBLE diarrhea from eating some tasty yard gunk. Luckily, the crate was so big that she could move around the crate and make puddles while keeping herself clean. T_T

I took my own beautiful Vana Fung out of the picture, but there's my own beautiful puppy at attention.