This week Ruby has been to the vet clinic (for vaccinations as I don’t have any record of when/if she has ever had these done) and she met her physio.
The vet visit went better than expected. She walked into the consult room voluntarily and she was able to eat while she was in there. She didn’t mind her intranasal or intramuscular vaccines, but she did not like it when the vet straddled her and tried to stretch her rear legs out. However, when I took her back on Friday for a little “happy visit” she looked a little less happy about the place, so we’ll have to do some more of those to help her learn to like the vet.
On the other hand, she loved every minute of her initial physiotherapy assessment, and spent most of it upside down demanding belly rubs. I’d noticed that she is a bit more muscly in one thigh than the other, but this is apparently nothing to worry about and she has a clean bill of health.
Different Every Day
This week I picked one of the very few skills that Ruby has – jumping up on a raised dog bed on cue – and presented it to her in a different way every day:
- Monday – with her hippo sitting next to it. Very tempting but dinner won out!
- Tuesday – with me sitting on the ground next to it. She was thoroughly bamboozled for 90 seconds and I had to help her, but after that she had it sussed.
- Wednesday – outside on the front lawn. This was a bit easier and I was able to build up a bit more distance, sending her from about 3m away.
- Thursday – wearing a hat and sunnies (me). Super easy!
- Friday – in a corner of the lounge, closed in on three sides. Tricky! Even from quite a close starting point, it took her quite a while to figure out where her bed was hiding.
- Saturday – in a harness (Ruby). This was the longest period of time she’s worn her harness, and she was a bit cautious at first, but she’s getting used to it.
- Sunday – I was going to see if she could do it with Able in the room on his bed. Unfortunately a bolt on one of the beds pinged off while we were playing on the front lawn (another new thing!) and I’ll have to wait until a replacement arrives to try that out. Instead we did some work on duration.
You don’t have to wait until you have finished teaching some agility skills before you can start proofing your dog against new environments, distractions, handler movement etc. The more silly little games like this you come up with, the easier you will find it with your “real agility” skills later.
Paws in a Box
We’ve been working on this for two weeks and we finally cracked it on Sunday morning. It took six sessions for her to happily offer any paws in the box – much longer than any of my other dogs – but once the penny dropped, she was soon putting all four in.
Here’s some of the things I accidentally trained her to do along the way:
- Put her head into a box and stare at the bottom looking for the next treat I might throw in there. She didn’t want to step into that box at all because the sides were a bit too high (she’s shorter than Able!).
- Lean forward and hold her head over the box, looking at me this time. This happened when I switched to a different box that was lower, but had flaps that were folded outwards and required a bit more effort to step over. She decided the flaps were toxic and she didn’t want to touch them, so I cut them off for the next session.
- Go around a box. This is what happens if you play Vito’s game (trying to train the dog to go around a cone) in one session, and then sit in the same spot next time and try to get your dog to put her feet in it. Bad training!
- Jump over the box. Whenever I got one paw in, I was throwing the treat out the other side to try to encourage her to move through it with more feet as she went to get it. She thought jumping was a much better way to get to the other side.
- Target a foam pad with her front paws (outside of the box). And then I transitioned it into the box for a couple of reps before I ended the session.
- Put four feet in a box!!! I removed the foam pad pretty quickly, and then I went back to tossing the treat out the other side to try to encourage her to walk through and put her rear feet in it. She figured out very quickly that I wanted all four feet in there, and she has good rear end awareness already so she can pivot her bum into the box if she approaches it from a funny angle.
Other Adventures
- Hand targets. We’ve made a lot of progress with these this week, and now it feels like she is deliberately touching my hand, rather than just sniffing to check if there’s food there.
- Putting on a harness. Ruby is very bad on a lead and will pull so hard she starts coughing, so for now I’m going to walk her in a back clip harness. She didn’t like putting her head through the hole, so I taught her to put her head through a Puller ring, and then the handle of a bungee toy (a tight fit), and now she’s much happier.
- Vito’s Game. I added a cone to the game to try and get her used to going out away from me around things. We made pretty good progress but it’s easy to keep going too long, and then the wheels start to fall off.
- Racing to bowl/toy. I took this game out into the front yard to build some more distance. We got up to 10m for the bowl, and I added a wee tiny cavaletti jump during one session, which she would only jump if I started her right in front of it. I also tried using a dead toy in the game – she’ll do it for a small ball if she can see it in the grass, but she doesn’t like Hol-ee Rollers enough to run and grab one if it’s not moving.