Class Report, Week 4

Class night! Not as stellar as the last two weeks, but if this is a bad night, I'll take it!

Diane did a great job with Indie and worked with him for the whole class. He was very distractable. One thing I noticed and suggested to her was that there were some opportunies where she could have clicked him for giving full attention. She also asked him for Speak a lot, which resulted in a lot of unrequested barking. Yuck. We decided that she should lay off Speak for class next week and click more for eye contact. Instead of surface work they played Musical Chairs, and they made it to about 6th place and got knocked out of the competition by Golden puppy Bailey and his young handler (8 yrs old?). It was a photo finish, but Indie was distracted by Bailey. It was fine with me though, because he was happy distracted rather than barking and fearful distracted. Homework for this week is a Leave It where you can leave a cookie on the floor in front of them.

Ebony, Ebony, Ebony. We had a full fledged "leap on everyone" night, although she still had very few chances to really try it and zero points where she got more than a foot or two away from me. There's one dog in particular who happens to be three-legged that she just wants to growl at all the time. It might be that he's three-legged that she reacts that way, but he also has a stare and a Presence, so I think it's a mix of things. I suspect the real issue this week was that she hasn't gotten enough excercise since we've had snow on the ground. Another cause may be that we didn't practice much this week, since Diane has mostly been walking her. Her heeling is still going very well. Class ran 15 minutes over (which means we ended at 10PM instead of 9:45PM), and I was counting the minutes! We went through 3 bait bags of treats that class.