Day 32 - Ring Rental and Town Walk

In our morning training session Jedi made more progress with putting the spoon into the bowl! I think he's really getting it now -- I'll have to get it on video. We did a very short pivot session because he offered it in both directions and I called it good and gave him a jackpot. I wonder if the reason he doesn't like pivoting as much is because he only gets one piece of food at a time. With the spoon trick and when we work on bottom outside I've been giving him handfuls at a time -- because I'm lazy and there's a lot of food to get through. It very well could be that he feels he's getting shafted with pivot these days and that's why he'd rather do other stuff. Something to think about, I suppose, and I can certainly up the rewards for pivot (it just won't be as smooth and flowing).

Today, thanks to Kizzy bailing off the teeter at the last two trials, I did a ring rental at Canine Sports Zone. The rental was at 11:00, so we left home at 9:00. That's Jedi's morning nap time, so that worked out well. He was starting to crash right before we left, so he pretty much zonked out the moment we started moving.

When we got to CSZ I let Jedi & Secret out to potty first and the put them back in the van to let Kaiser & Kizzy out. Jedi's side door was open and he decided to let me know he didn't think it was fair that they were out and he wasn't. Well, yes, to date life pretty much has been all about him, so I guess that's no surprise. It was short-lived, though, and he didn't do it again while we were there.

I worked Kizzy, then Kaiser, then Secret, then Kizzy again to get her on the teeter one more time. There was about ten minutes left in my hour, so I brought Jedi in to run around the arena with me a bit. We played with the tail tug, running together when he had it, and having him chase me when he let go (so much running when I'd already been going full on for an hour...). He also got to show me his bottom on the a-frame and dog walk.

The training mats had a whole bunch of puppy agility equipment strewn around. I brought Jedi's lunch with, along with the FitBone and other stuff, but I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to play on some new stuff. There was a tiny plank a few inches tall for practicing bottom, there was a teeter board raised on a couple of milk crates to walk across, a teeny-tiny teeter, a wobble board, and a balance disc (inflated way more than mine at home, so it moved a lot more).

Jedi struggled with a few distractions. Someone was doing some construction work in the area we were in, so there were some drilling/sawing noises occasionally. Someone walked out of the office with a dog and took him by surprise (I put his leash on at that point to make sure he stayed with me), and he woofed at a couple of other things that startled him. I'm sure part of the issue is that he's not terribly motivated by food, so he found those things more interesting. He did reconnect with me, though, and did a great job playing with the new equipment. Jedi had absolutely zero fear of the wobble board or the movement of the tiny teeter, which leads me to believe it's not the movement of my teeter that's bothering him.

Once we got through his lunch I asked for more behaviors using his tennis ball. I got a lot zippier response. He's really figured out the concept of working for toys and it seems to really jazz him up.

I didn't know if we'd do an additional outing after work, but I decided to go ahead and take Jedi out to improve my odds of having him sleep during my school seminars tonight. I didn't want to go far or do much because it looked like rain, so I opted to take Kaiser and Jedi on a walk through a nearby neighborhood. I parked in the bank parking lot and took off for who knows where, as I wasn't familiar at all with the neighborhood. It started to rain shortly after we took off, so that was fun. We saw a couple of dogs being walked and got to deal with a frantic, crazed boxer barking and lunging at us from the end of his tie-out (both out and back). I was glad I had Kaiser along, because he doesn't even blink at that sort of thing.

After four weeks of letting Jedi do pretty much whatever he wanted to on walks, I decided it was time to introduce a little more structure to our leash walks. This pretty much means don't walk behind me, don't cross in front of me, and stay in the general area I put you in. This was hard for him and he clipped my heels several times trying to go behind, got stepped on once when he tried to cross in front, and had to be stopped numerous times from trying to move directly in front of my feet. I think the main issue there is that Kaiser walks on my right and Jedi was trying to join him. I do walk the Klee Kai abreast on the right, but sorry Jedi, you are a border collie, you will walk on the left.  :o)  For the most part, especially considering that this was the first time it was being asked of him, Jedi did really well with these new rules. It will just take some time for him to get used to the change, I'm sure. I should take him out with Secret, as I'm sure he'd be happy getting to walk next to her on the right.

We all got pretty wet, but it was worth it to have a quiet puppy tonight! Since we were already wet, we went ahead and did our dinner session outside. I have absolutely no idea what has changed, but Jedi pretty much charged for the teeter (still raised a couple of inches, I haven't moved anything) and jumped right on. The hesitancy was completely gone tonight and he eagerly hopped on the raised plank from both sides and rode it down. We went through his dinner fairly quickly because he got BIG rewards for that. I was tempted to raise it a little higher, but I kept my stupidity in check and left it where it was. For as long as it took for him to get over this issue, we're going to make sure things are good and confident here before going up so much as an inch. But hooray! Huge progress.