March 19, 2003
The Many Faces of Dusty
Link: Oregon Couple Charged with Animal Mischief in Massive Hoarding Case. A guy on the Clicker mailing list adopted one of these dogs.
10:00 a.m.
Good morning! As of last night, the snow on our front lawn is about 99% gone. There's a small drift, rapidly diminishing, over by the driveway.
The reason I know this is because it's the only place in the yard that Dusty will poo. She explores every inch of the yard, tugs on fallen branches, runs around with twigs, eats every Dead Thing she can while I'm not watching her. But she won't poo until we walk over to the snow.
It's amazing. She sees the snow and breaks into a trot. She sniffs the snow lovingly and nudges it with her nose. She sniffs the snow thoroughly and when she finds that perfect spot, she does her business.
I'm concerned about this. Short of a freak April snowstorm (and believe me, they *do* happen), we're not going to see any more snow until next fall. I hope Dusty gets the hang of pooing on grass very, very soon.
8:00 p.m.
A few training notes:
Dusty's doing SO well in her training. We haven't really learned too many new skills - mostly we're refining and reinforcing skills that Dusty already knows.
One new skill that Dusty has learned is 'front'. This just means that she comes around to my front and sits, facing me. It was ridiculously easy to teach - she got it right away. The companion skill is 'swing' - from my front, she crosses over to my left and sits beside me, in the 'heel' position.
She's learned to 'wait' before going through a door or up/down the stairs: she sits down and waits for me. She also waits when I'm unlocking a door. We get lots of practice with this one! ;-) My favourite 'wait' is at mealtime - she waits before she goes over to her foodbowl to eat.
May I take the moment to sing the praises of 'stay'? Knuckle head that I am, it didn't occur to me until relatively recently that I could actually use a 'stay' to keep Dusty in place when I needed her to. I LOVE 'stay'!
Her sit/down/stays are very VERY solid. She's up to a three minute stay. I'm really proud of her ability to sit/down/stand/(and even, rollover) while in a stay. These are usuallly known as "distance commands." Dusty does these behaviours with either verbal direction or hand signals from up to 5 metres away (that's the furthest I can get in my tiny apartment).
Her recall is nearly 100%, even with *distractions*. I was wowing the people in the dogpark with her great recall a few days ago. I owe my success entirely to dog treats - she always gets one when she responds to a 'come'.
Also, I finally taught Dusty the 'stand' command. I worked on this one when she was 11 weeks old with no success. When she was 16 weeks old, I tried again and she got it right away. Weird! A good lesson, though: If she doesn't catch on right away, wait until she's a bit older.
And finally, Dusty has mastered LLW (loose leash walking), a skill that was very important to me. We have been walking every day now, and she never pulls on the lead. When we first started out walks, it took us a long time to get very far because every time she pulled, I stopped. She's figured out now that we go much faster when she walks on a loose leash! Hooray!
Puppy school was moved back a week - we now start on March 26th. I'm very interested to see how much Dusty retains in a distraction-filled environment. Also, doggy-adolescence is right around the corner and there's always a loss of motivation around that time (just like human teenagers, I'm afraid!).
She's still into stuff she shouldn't be. She still runs around the apartment like a maniac-dog (since space is at a premium here, she frequently runs circles around me, making us both dizzy!).
The front yard has become a Very Distracting Place. As soon as she hits the yard, she grabs the nearest stick and racing around crazily, wrapping her leash around trees, keeping me very, very busy keeping up with her. I've given up on getting stuff out of her mouth. If it looks like she's eating something, I tell her to 'drop it' and she usually does if she thinks there's a treat waiting for her.