Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

I meant to post a summary of what I learned from our August training challege at the first of September, but with the computer problems we’ve been having…it just didn’t happen. So, here it is now, better late than never.

I thought that the challenge worked as I had hoped for both Raven and Twist. They both were able to maintain focus in new places we trained and by the end of the month Twist had successfully been able to compete for three days in an outdoor obedience trial that he had never been to before. Raven also showed improvement by the end of the month when we went to a new place for agility. She didn’t shutdown or show signs of stress over the new environment. Yay! On the other hand, I had really hoped that this challenge would benefit Rogue most of all and in looking back I don’t think accomplished what I had hoped for her.

The thing that is hard for me to keep in mind is that this challenge was not so much based on how the dogs did, but in my ability to observe how the dogs handled new situations and help them to become more confident and focused. So looking at it from that perspective, even though Rogue did not seem to have any breakthroughs, in fact she seemed to regress in some places, she gave me lots of information to work with.

So, Raven and Twist were relatively easy for me in different places. They just needed to have a few minutes to walk around and figure out where we were before we started training. As long as I made sure that they could focus on simple behaviors first, neither seemed to have any trouble working on more complex training. The information that I got from Rogue though was way different! It didn’t seem to matter if she had time to walk around and explore. That didn’t alleviate the anxiety around the people, agility equipment or even around the ringates at the obedience trial. Simple tasks were too much for her to focus on at that point. The one thing that we tried that did make a difference was something that I just stumbled onto by accident. I got out the clicker and her little food dish. When we went out by the agility equipment I set her food dish down and asked her to “hit it” when she heard the clicker it was like a little lightbulb went on for her. I still don’t really understand why the clicker brings her attitude up more than a simple “yes”, like I normally use, but it did, so we’re going with it. Once she can do those basic things a couple of times, her tail comes back up, the glazed look disappears and she can work almost like she can at home. It has worked for us in several places now. It may be a small piece of information, but it seems to be a very valuable one right now. So if nothing else, I think the training challenge was a success in that it gave me a tool to help Rogue.