Today I read an excellent post on a project about where babies come from. Sounds sort of boring, right? Well, watch this video. I was laughing, I was tearing up, I was ready to give a dollar (after asking my wife’s permission). So I clicked on over to the Kickstarter page and saw they had already blown their original goal out of the water. Anyway, I can’t wait till this comes out, and the video is worth watching. Happy Tuesday!
My dogs are perfect*
*Some restrictions apply.
Believe it or not, the dogs of (even superawesome) dog trainers are (in my experience) very rarely perfect. The dog trainers I know have a habit that is both wonderful and dangerous: they adopt the dogs with issues. But who better to pick these dogs? I can tell you pretty confidently that if another family had Daph, they would have returned her to the shelter after less than six months. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened. And Fae? Well, she’s awfully cute and is amazing in a lot of ways, but she has her flaws, too. No one likes a resource-guarding pit bull puppy, or a puppy that screams through the night**. Between those two qualities, any normal, sane person who didn’t train their dogs for fun would have returned her four months ago.
who, me?
I recently mentioned to Turtle that a dog trainer friend was having some issues with her dog. Turtle was shocked! “But she’s a dog trainer,” she muttered in horror. “She’s supposed to have awesome dogs. Perfect dogs. You mean it’s not just us?”
I don’t know whether it’s the thrill of the challenge, the recognition that no one else would be willing to work as hard on the issues we see, or something else altogether, but I am here to tell you that a dog trainer with a Dog with Issues is not a recommendation to run the other way. Rather, it is a sign that the trainer is willing to do the work; that they know what is involved in changing a behavior that can truly affect the lives of both the dog and the owner; and that they are not just talking the talk. A trainer with a “problem dog” really does understand the stress of having a dog that barks at strangers and pulls on the leash. Hell, a trainer with a perfect dog (if such a thing exists) know what it’s like to have a dog that pulls on a leash.
I can't believe you're telling the internet about my issues. How embarrassing! I can't bear to show my face.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to admit that my dogs aren’t perfect, and that I haven’t completely overcome every hurdle with them. Daphne still barks and lunges at strangers and vehicles. I still will not trust Fae with a ball and unfamiliar dogs in the same space. But I can tell you that we are working on it, and we work on it every day. I have some good tools and I definitely have the motivation (moreso when Turtle is saying, “Fix it. Fix it now.”). Most of the issues I see are not things you can fix in a day, but with just a few minutes every day, we are definitely making progress.
another cozy Sunday (Daph is ready for the photoshoot to end)
Have you ever met a perfect dog? Was it perfect everywhere***?
**Ok, that only happened once.
***Daphne is perfect in the house with everyone, but only after they have been in the house for 10 minutes. She is perfect with new dogs off-leash. She is perfect with any dog that comes into the house. Faegan is perfect in public, and when she is asleep.
Filed under Menagerie
A change is gonna come…
Besides school, coaching, and my shelter work, I have clients to care for in my dog training/cat sitting business. I’ve been taking care of Beckett since last summer, and it’s been fantastic to watch her grow up!
Beckett is a purebred Lagoto, which is sort of like an Italian (rather that Portuguese) water dog, and she is just a couple of months older than Faegan. She and Fae play really well together, and she has even come over for a long playdate.
Recently, I have been working on loose-leash walking with Faegan and with Beckett. I learned a new teaching technique at the shelter, and it has been working like magic! Before this, I had been doing a lot of the “tree” technique where you just stop when the dog pulls, and then keep walking or maybe click and treat or maybe treat when the dog is walking the right way. I am all for clicking and treating, but my issue with this method is that I was never entirely sure what I was clicking and treating FOR – what was the behavior I wanted? “Loose leash walking” is hard to measure and hard to define in an exact way. Anyway, new methods are going well, and here’s the video I made for Beckett’s moms! It has music but you can watch it on mute, too.
What are your magical training hurdles? Anything that it has taken you awhile to figure out, but then it clicked?
Filed under Menagerie
Vacation week, woo hoooo!
It’s school vacation week for me and for my rowers, which means that I am just hanging out, relaxing. Shootin’ the breeze. Drinking mimosas every morning. In fact, here is the view from my window.
(personal photo)
Oh, hang on a minute, I just woke up. Vacation week means MORE TIME TO DO ALL THE THINGS. Like, you know, work, and prepare for the classes I don’t actually have to attend this week. In fact, I’m late for work as we speak!
So I leave you with a photo of what came in the mail this weekend. Fun times.
mah belleh is so nekkid! (that's right, fae doesn't know how to spell)
luckily i got this kickass hoodie to keep me warm.
Daphne hates wearing clothes, thus no adorable pictures of her from this weekend… but here’s a sad, sad picture from three years ago, when I happily ignored her desire to curl up and die of embarrassment.
the torture!
remarkably tolerant
Whose day isn’t made better by photos of dogs in clothes? okay, usually mine. But not today! Happy Tuesday everyone!
Filed under Uncategorized
I’m not comparing puppies or anything, but…
… I am definitely preparing to compare puppies.
Today, Faegan turns 9 months old! Happy sort of birthday, Faegan!
brand new puppy, ~4 months old, just 2 days after we got her
Much less gangly, more solid puppy, last Sunday, almost 9 months old!
Nine months is an important measuring stick for me, because that’s how old Daphne was when I adopted her. Okay, the real comparisons will come in two weeks, because Daph was exactly 9.5 months old when I brought her home, but 9 months still feels like a milestone. When I adopted Daphne, she had some normal puppy issues: she barked through the night for several nights in a row; she had accidents in the house; she was afraid of other dogs and didn’t know how to play with them; she was terrified of strangers and I didn’t know how to handle that.
Now, Daphne knows which dogs she wants to play with and how to play well with them; the rest, she ignores. She sleeps through the night and has even graciously donated her crate to Faegan (it’s so roomy!), and for all we know, she sleeps happily on her bed in the living room (though we admit that not seeing her on the couch doesn’t mean she wasn’t sleeping on the couch). She has never had an accident in our last three homes, and she only barks to protect us all. She’s very good at protecting us all. Also? We can have almost all visitors petting her within half an hour of their arrival. Major progress.
Daphne on the day she came home
With all of that in mind, Fae is not doing too badly.** All of her “problem” behaviors are things we can work on: chasing cats, building a reliable recall. Yup, those are pretty much her only issues. We’ve been working on her leash walking and she is a *rockstar* (plus I’m an amazing trainer, duh. Slash she loves liver and will do anything for it, take your pick of which of those answers seems more feasible.). We changed the stuff that’s in her crate and she’s not destroying it nearly as much (ahem, or we just don’t care and she already pulled all the stuffing out, so there’s no more to pull out? Again, take your pick.).
Anyway, we’re all settling in to this two dog household thing, and both dogs remind me to appreciate certain qualities in the other one. I’m pretty happy where we are. Thanks, dogs.
Do you compare your beasts? Are they similar or different, and do you appreciate or resent those differences?
**Okay, maybe I am comparing puppies. Oh well. I find them both satisfactory.
Filed under Menagerie
