One Third of a Dog

I realized I didn't get a chance to announce here that Grace is part of the family!  Well a third of her is at least!

My parents will be co-owning Grace as a potential breeding girl for her breeder!  Due to her puppiness and some complicated family matters, Grace is continuing to live at my house and will be for another few months.  

My optimistic plan is to continue training Grace in obedience and potentially show her in the obedience ring (and possibly agility) when she is older.  I am hoping that her foundations will solid enough by the time she moves in with my parents that the transition to less training time with me won't be much of a setback?!  

Grace has really grown up to a fantastic dog.  Very confident.  Super outgoing.  Eager to work.  Obsessive with cookies!

And so far not quite as gigantic as I had pictured!  Currently, she's 6.5 months old and the exact same weight and height as Zumi.

She is still a very clumsy girl and struggles with body awareness and unconscious drumming of her feet so many things are progressing slowly in her training. But I'm really having fun seeing her mature!

Right now the things I've been paying the most attention to are:

Marker cues: Pretty good with various food reward cues of coming to hand, chase a cookie, and reward from the dish.  We are just introducing a room service marker cue of waiting in place.

Chin rests/sticky targets: Not really on verbal cues, but an understanding of chin rests to my hand in front of her, chin rest to the floor, sticky target of the side of her face to my hand in heel position.  And she's doing well with learning to ignore my hand movements and touches in prep for exam work. 

Pivoting/heelwork:  Great understanding of how to move her body to be parallel.  Mainly working right now on getting her position further back so she's not forging.

Fronts: With a chin rest target she can pivot with me and side step and is working on short tosses.  

Position Changes: Using front and/or rear foot targets and right now all of her understanding is for front foot still criteria.  Of the 6 possible combinations, the only one not introduced is down to sit as I plan to do rear feet still for that.  This area is where we've had a lot of delays due to Grace's foot patters while waiting for cues or even in the offered stage.  But things are coming together and she's starting to get the verbal cues for sit/stand/down.  So far all the work has been in front of me, not yet in heel/side position.

Articles:  She has a fairly good understanding of doing a chin rest alert to a pile of metal lids.  Grace is a bit prone to giving up and guessing if she can't find the correct one quickly but we are seeing improvements. I've just started adding in canning rings as "distractions" and she's had 1 session learning to do a pile of canning rings and going to a retrieve alert.

Newer skills that I've started include:

- Go outs: Teaching a nose touch to the stanchion.  She really wants to arch to face the right side so I'm working against a wall and using reward placement to encourage her to stay straight as she touches.

- Marking: Transitioning from learning the cue/signal to look at food on a lid to marking an empty lid and nose touching it.

And I continue to wait for a puppy of my own!  The litter I was planning on had only boys and I know I do best with girls!  The wait continues for another potential litter but the mom was in a split-heat this February and wasn't able to be bred then...

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Grace 16wks

Puppy Grace is growing fast!  22lbs at 16wks of age! 

She is one nice puppy.  I am in love with how confident she is with absolutely everything.  LOVES people.  Loves climbing and stepping on things.  Great natural focus.

We are still working on potty training and not chewing things.  She hasn't been the easiest puppy in those regards, but at least she no longer will have an accident when crated!  Phew!

In training, the biggest thing Grace has struggled with is still feet.  She reminds me of a  miniature schnauzer (sorry schnauzers!) with how they like to "drum" when excited.  I don't think she's aware of her up and down foot movement at all and that's making it hard to train stillness of any type.  Even when her feet are on something she still moves them often.  My go to behaviors of chin rests, slow cookies and doggy zen work aren't helping much.  

So, for the most part, I'm skipping any work on position changes as even when folding into a down I don't like how her paw lifts up.  

Eye contact work with doggy zen games are also coming along very slowly as while she will offer looking it's with lots of that stupid drumming.  She's doing much better learning more active behaviors with the zen hand such as sending out around a cone or to a target.

And I guess since this is turning into the post of what is hard for Grace, I'll throw in retrieves too!  I was actually planning on teaching Grace the stationary hold first instead of my usual approach which teaches the pickup and movement to my hand first.  More so because it's a popular method and while I've used with a handful of dogs at work I haven't done the technique that much with puppies besides The Boykin.

Grace told me she wasn't going to be that puppy!  When I was trying to work on duration I just kept getting repeated crunching.  It's like she learned bite, bite again, bite again, "why aren't you rewarding me, I'm biting again!!"  vs bite and just keep your mouth on it.  So I went to slowly moving it away from her to try to get her to bite and really grip it as it's moving- a trick I've done often in the past.  Nope, lots of talented crunching while walking.  

Oh well.  Switching to teaching the movement piece first is going well.  She's picking it up really well and just starting to really target my hand.  I'll be going back to stationary holding pretty soon it looks like with how fast she's progressing!

The other big thing I'm playing with Gracie is the stuff from my Bye Bye Cookie class.  No emphasis on actually getting rid of rewards, just emphasizing that the reward can come from different places.  She's way more food obsessed than my other tollers and needs work on really thinking around the food!  Although looking back, I guess even puppy Zumi liked food more than toys so perhaps time just colors my perception!

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Grace 10wks

Little Grace just turned 10 weeks old!  Things have been going very well other than the one crappy issue.  Pun intended.  As Grace is one of Those puppies who doesn't mind peeing or pooping in a small crate.

Her crate training has gone very well.  Her crate is right next to me in the bedroom or right near the action and she doesn't make a peep.  Even when she clearly has to go.

And it didn't help that after the first week she started to have some diarrhea issues! Ugh.
I got so sick of cleaning up a poopy crate and giving constant baths that I decided I'm done with the crate.  On the positive side, Grace loves her baths!

Until the issue is resolved we are only using an xpen to confine her most of the time.  At least that way she can have a bed on one and then wander over and poop at a different end. Hopefully preventing her from lying down in it and painting everything.

Despite the horrors of this issue, her potty training isn't going too bad.  She's one of the few dogs I'm choosing to use cookies with to reward her for potty outside, and we just go out a lot.  I always take puppies out a lot, and Grace is definitely going out more than just "a lot" most days.  There's no safe spot for her if she doesn't actually do anything outside and that's the most frustrating piece.  But she does seem to be getting it.  A few nights without an accident at least!

Netta's been very helpful in training her house manners too!  She likes to say "Grace!!" and then "chew bone" and runs to grab a toy when she sees Grace chewing something she shouldn't be!

She's been on some hamburger and rice the last week so not much training has been happening.  We have a bit of W/D I've been giving her occasionally as well, but things are looking better so hopefully we can resume training.

Mainly we are working on 2 skills
1. Put your feet on things.  2 feet on a perch, 4 feet on a platform, 4 feet in a box...

2. Learning to wait for her food dish cue.  My goal is to get her food bowl to the floor when I'm training and have Grace ignore it as I grab handfuls to train from.  Right now I'm starting this with the food bowl high and working on picking it up and setting it down in different locations.  When Grace turns to me I reward her lots but I'm not yet having any eye contact criteria.

As it gets lower, if she goes to it I try to quickly use my food hand to stop her and reward her for stopping, then move the bowl higher if that location still seems to hard.

I'm just starting to do some occasional reps of teaching her "get it" means run for the cookie tosses, keep ignoring the dish.

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Puppy Grace!

Puppy!! 

 Not my puppy, but I do get to start her for a few months!  The definition of "few" isn't worked out yet :)

Her name is Grace and she's from Zumi's breeder.  Actually, she's a puppy from Cougar!  Cougar is the little mountain lion I had for just over a month when she was around 4 months old, 2.5 years ago!

Cougar puppy!

Grace is a pretty calm, snuggly puppy, but has actually surprised me with her puppy spunkiness too.  Cougar was quite low key for just 4 months old and so far Grace seems a bit more animated.  It'll be interesting to see how it progresses!

The first 3 days have mainly revolved around crate training.  Crate training is the one thing I just hate about puppies!  Grace has quite a large lung capacity and had no problem screaming or whining for hours, but at the same time she's actually quite relaxed.  

Grace will eat treats at anytime, and doesn't look remotely panicked in her fits.  Just upset!  

Most of the time we've worked on the xpen as an easier introduction to being crated.  She really is progressing quickly and I expect that in 2 more days she will be completely fine crated or penned.  Easy puppy. And she's apologized for ruining Netta's nap!

 I've also slowly started the process of having Grace learn to wait patiently while other the other dogs get "trained."  She gets to wait in her xpen while I drop in cookies and do super easy stuff with another dog at mealtime.  Lots of cookies for Grace, nothing exciting happening with the other dogs.

Since I don't do station training with my dogs, they just get to roam around while another is trained, as long as they don't get in the way, the plan will eventually be the same for Grace.  This skill is a big priority for me as I feel I can't devote even my tiny mealtime training with the dogs until the new kid has the rules down!

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