I ran into a couple of snags in my training challenge this last week. I made two attempts to train in different locations. First, I went out to the shelter to use their parking lot, lobby and area by their livestock pens, but because of poor planning I ran out of time to work with all three dogs. I then went to the county fairgrounds another day and didn’t have the cooperation of the weather, so we got rained out. So…we went back out to the shelter on a second attempt yesterday. Here’s the update.
Time of day: It was about 12:30.
Who was there: I was by myself, with Twist, Raven and Rogue.
Where we trained: Local County Animal Shelter. It has a paved parking lot, several acres of unpaved, undeveloped dirt area back by the livestock pens, and a lobby/waiting area inside the building. The shelter staff was inside the building, but no one else even drove into the parking lot while I was there.
What we worked on: Twist went first. We did some basic heelwork, both on and off leash around the parking lot and outside of the building. We did a couple of recalls, and then we set up a practice jump in the dirt area close to the parking lot. We did several dumbell retrieves over the jump. His heelwork was nice, and his about turns were much better than last time. I think the work on doing 270’s is helping that lag we were getting before. I was really happy because he wasn’t going around the jump on the return trip with the dumbell this time, even though these were my funky practice jumps. Raven went next. We did some on-leash heelwork, a couple of recalls, some signals, and we played around a bit with the jumps too. I was most pleased with her signals. Rogue was last. I let her take her time walking around the grounds for a few minutes to figure out where we were. Then I started her with just doing a little 3 jump sequence. She did fine. She didn’t seem worried about being in a strange place at all really. Since she had really struggled with being inside the lobby the first time we came out to train, I decided to try that again. This time, we didn’t have any of the shelter staff come out to sit with us, it was just Rogue and myself. She was really nervous as soon as we got inside again. I decided that I wouldn’t have any of the staff come sit and talk with us again, I’d just work with her by myself instead. The door makes a funny noise as the wind blows, so that really had her attention. Anytime she would reorient to me, I’d click and treat her. After a few minutes she got relaxed enough to give me a few “hit its” with her paw on my hand, and I called it a day.
Overview: I was really disappointed that there weren’t any people coming in and out of the building or parking lot. I would have liked more distractions like that for Twist and Raven. They both worked really nicely, but I didn’t think that it was much of a challenge for them. Rogue did better than the first time we visited this location, but I also tried to lower my criteria inside the lobby so that she could have more success, and less stress.