One of the new things we taught today in trick class was a send away to station next to a cone. Lily picked up the concept quickly, but when I turned around to talk to the class she appeared to forget everything. Then I realised, we'd just been doing it where I point using my left hand, then when I turned to the class I used my right hand. So I tested it a few timed. Lily had really clearly learnt - Left hand point + words = go to the cone. Right hand point is clearly just irrelevant information to be ignored. https://www.instagram.com/stories/rachel.trains.animals/3565191072237958292?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=MWJydzhvZGQ2bGc2NQ==

I'm curious what you are feeding your dogs, and why you made that choice? What's your favourite dog food? Also, how often are you feeding your dogs? What brands have you had a good or bad experience with?

I missed a few days so I'm going back to day 1! Lizzie is currently in a super pro-social phase (yay adolescence!), so today we went right back to basics and did lots of practice passing dogs and ignoring them as they walked by. We let her greet a couple with a release cue, but the rest we completed ignored. It was better than a few days ago, she's not obsessive. But anytime another dog was interested in her she definitely wanted to greet them, and struggled to disengage from one basset hound in particular (who in fairness, was also desperate to see her 😅)

This morning we took Lizzie to the park where she always gets to run and play with other dogs, but today we stayed on the edge for a while first, and played tug together. Did a little bit of "look at that", then when a dog came over to us, Lizzie did a really nice wait for her release cue, and greeted him very politely. https://www.instagram.com/stories/rachel.trains.animals/3564386289855939708?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=MWMzM3FycWM1b3UwZw==

Tonight in tricks class we wanted to focus on behaviours being on cue control and not being predicted by the prop. So we had a hat, practiced 5 tricks with the hat (send around, wear the hat, muzzle up, fetch the hat, and paws up on the hat) - then we asked for them in sequence with no lures at all, to make sure the dogs were focused on our cues!