Happy days



I'm just a sitting fool these days. 
Perhaps Mummy should get me a chair.

Things are going very well.  We're continuing our daily training/socialization walks.  Annie now starts looking for treats (looks up at my bait bag) as soon as she spots a person approaching on a walk, and no longer needs to retreat off the sidewalk as they go by.  And she'll merrily take treats from anybody.  Since it's next to impossible to stop people from reaching toward her, I just make sure she gets a goodie when this happens, and abracadabra, she now ducks aways much less dramatically and looks at the treat pouch when a hand starts coming at her.  Yippee!

She's started barking at the front door (through the security/screen door) when she hears people go by, especially at night.  This could have been her shyness partly morphing from flight to "bark, bark, go away!" as she gets more comfortable and perhaps territorial.  But timing her out seems to be working, meaning it's probably just garden variety watchdog/excitement barking.  So when she rushes to the door barking and growling, I say, "That's enough," and when she keeps barking, follow up with "Too bad," and then baby gate her alone in the kitchen for a minute or two.  It's a pain to interrupt my evening couch potato time repeatedly for this--thank goodness for DVR's--but voila, she's doing it less and less.  This morning when she started barking at the mailman, who comes right up on the porch to deliver the mail, she actually stopped when I gave the "that's enough," warning cue, and began wagging happily at him.  Don't think she was too upset!

She still tries to hide behind my exercise bike (next to her favorite bed) when she hears the faintest gardening motor noise.  It's often so faint that the first thing I notice is her hiding, then have to strain to hear the sound.  The only good thing about this is that loud versions don't seem much worse.  In any case, I've taken up doing mini recall exercises for this: 

1. I call her  ("Annie, Annie, Annie," in my jolliest happy voice)
2. I toss treats just a little closer to me (just so she has to bring her head out from behind the bike)
3. Then toss a line of treats between where she is and where I'm sitting (about 6' away), which she collects.
4. Then I let her retreat to her hiding spot again and repeat.
5. I repeat until she will come all the way to me without any treats on the way.  By this time she's usually ready to lie down on her bed and relax--I toss her treats for this.

I'm using this technique for a couple of reasons:

• To give her something else to do (think about) during the scary noise
• To make coming to me her most likely behavior when something scary occurs. 

So that's our story after 3 and a half weeks.

Back on track

Poor little Annie has had diarrhea for a week, "blowing mud," as an old kennel hand acquaintance used to indelicately describe it.  We couldn't do any work, as I had to keep her to a small portion bland diet.  I only cheated (with bits of plain chicken breast) for meeting people and for the Terrifying Trimmers, Loathsome Lawn mowers and Spine chilling saws, i.e, any 1 or 2 stroke motor, even faintly in the distance.  She seems to think that outside is very dangerous whenever she hears one of these (even if it's a utube recording coming from my computer on the dining room table), so am going to move the computer simulation outside.

She's also learned that exciting and brave are very good words, as when a big noise happens on a walk, I say, "Ooooo, very exciting!" and give a treat, and when a person who's not a candidate to give her a goodie goes by and she sniffs the scent wake, I say, "very brave!" and then deliver.  She now perks up and looks expectant when she hears either word.  This is great, as I'll be able to use these words' pleasant associations eventually to jolly her up even if I'm caught unarmed (treatless--shame on me in advance!).

House training continues apace.  Have started letting her wander around a bit as times when she may need to go approach, and was able to interrupt her twice as she wound up to pee and hustle her outside.  OK, as she started to pee.  So some dribble inside with a big "ah ah," interruption and finishing up outside to accolades and smooches.  This is the first step to getting her to hold on until I can get her outside when she needs to go. 

And now that I'm free to treat again, clicker training can re-commence.  Fun is the very best thing to have!.

Sit and other mysteries

Couldn't resist doing a little clicker training to teach Annie to sit. In this kind of training, you click a little plastic thingy (see picture at right) at the exact moment the dog does this behavior you want to reward, then give a treat. In the first session I started by clicking and treating when she went to a bed to lie down (I don't have to wait long for her to do this!). I clicked just at the moment her elbows hit the bed. When she was repeating this consistently, I started to click just before she completed the down, when her behind was already on the bed, but her front legs were still partially extended. At first she would continue into a full down after the click before getting up to retrieve her goodie, but gradually she began to abort the down when I clicked--finishing the down motion was just wasted time between the click and getting her treat--dogs are very efficient! In about 15 minutes we got to the point where she started to hold in the sit position.

If you want to see what this process actually looks like, the little video here (apologies for the quality and framing!) is our second 10 minute sit training session, at the end of which I've invested a total of 20 minutes, and have a Greyhound who is is likely to try sitting as a way to earn a treat. From here I can progress to adding a cue, weaning her off the bed, and getting rid of the pre-sit circling.

This is a very un-techy version of clicker training and is lots of fun if you like doing stuff with suspense (will she or won't she?) and that let you sharpen your timing.

I love watching a dog solve a puzzle like this.

Doggie drama

Henry and Annie had a little tiff yesterday.  I was looking the other direction and didn't see how it happened--may have been too close quarters with Henry still excited about his chicken baby food incentivized toenail dremeling.  Annie was the one yelping and running away with a little ding on her nose, but Henry was the one who was afraid to walk very close to her for the rest of the day, so who knows how it started.  In any case they seem completely over it now, as you can see.

General updates:

House training is progressing with no further accidents, and since Annie has so far never eliminated within 4 hours of the last event, I've relaxed her non crate/or direct eyes on supervision for the first 2-3 hours after she goes.  It would be nice if she would go during walks, but I'm not willing to crate her all the rest of the time to make walks her only opportunities, so I'll just see if this works itself out.

She's so comfortable in the car now that she just curls up and goes to sleep, even if left alone for a few minutes--yippee!

And inside the house has become such a safe zone that it only took 3 warm-ups with the vacuum cleaner for her to decide it was completely ho-hum.  The shredder motor she positively loves.  She comes running in from the next room when she hears it.

On what was supposed to be our quiet, non-stressful walk at the marina this morning, there was a maintenance guy rolling 2 huge, very noisy trash barrels around, seemingly following or just preceding us everywhere we went.  She tried to flee one time when the big noise first started behind us, but was able to take treats from just a few feet off the sidewalk as the guy dragged his barrels by and after about 6 encounters, started to look toward my treat pouch when she heard the barrel noise start up.  This is the first time I've seen an indication that a scary noise is beginning to predict a treat for her.  Breakthrough.

One kitchen counter transgression that I didn't anticipate in time to give the "off" warning in the last couple of days, but she immediately got down when I did give it.

Am continuing to add goodies to her food bowl and do exchanges with toys, but haven't seen any further evidence of guarding.

Which leads me to today's fun discovery--little Annie is crazy for tennis balls and other fetch objects.  I believe I can easily make her into a frisbee dog, but more important, this is a powerful new motivator to use for all sorts of things.  She found a tennis ball in the yard and was thrilled to chase it.  She also wanted to take it back to her bed and chew on it, but I gave her a toy substitute for this, as I don't want her to ruin her teeth.  And I have an old toy called a "Giggly wiggly" ball that has never interested any of my other dogs much.  It's a large (maybe 1/2.basketball sized) thing that makes all kinds of varied squeaky/squawky/gurgly noises when it's rolled or thrown.  That's it in the picture.  She's over the moon for this.  I'm pretty sure I can use it to teach her to sit in a couple of days.  I just withhold it for a bit until she gives up and goes to a bed, then as she sits (but before she can get all the way into a down), I say, "yes!" and roll it for her.  She thinks this is tremendous.  I do too.

We are definitely having fun.

Ups and Downs

Lots of things going well. 

• No more potty glitches, and voila, this morning, Baby Annie actually came up to me whining and nudging that she needed to go outside.  This is much earlier than I expected. 
• She's a pro on the stairs now, needed no prompting at all to go upstairs (she's more motivated to go inside the house than outside--inside appears to be a safe zone for her).  She needs a food lure from the bottom of the stairs to come down from the porch into the yard (or an initial lift of the front end onto the first step), but this is just the difference in motivation.
• She's no longer fearful in the car.  She lies down and settles within a minute of getting in and even gets her front end in on her own some times.  (Back end still needs to be lifted, as it hasn't occurred to her to hop up onto anything with the back end yet.)  Getting over the car fear involved at least 2 car rides per day for habituation (repetition of the fearful stimulus until dog discovers nothing bad happens) and 3 short (15 minute) training sessions of laying down a trail of roast beef bits into the car, feeding her once she got in, then taking her out again until she started heading back into the car as soon as she was out.  I decided to work on this a bit more actively, BTW, because some of the car ride destinations were getting stressful (see below) and I wanted some happy "padding" for the car.
• Doing great on alone time.  Is snoozing in her crate among mostly empty kongs when I return from errands.
• Doing geat on resource guarding prevention.  She now looks up in anticipation of a treat when I approach her while she's eating or playing with/gnawing on a toy.  Will try actual contraband (e.g., papers) soon.
• Also started "off" training, as she's so comfortable and spunky in the house now that she's been persistently counter surfing in the kitchen.  The steps were:
1. Caught her with front feet on the counter, said, "Off," she ignored me (of course!), I said "too bad," and put her in her crate for 30 seconds. (I only had to do this once before proceeding to step 2.)
2. Caught her with front feet on the counter, said, "Off," she got down.  I praised and petted her.  Did this about 6 times before proceeding to step 3.
3. Caught her just as she was about to launch, said, "Off," she stopped.  I rewarded her with a piece of chicken and lots of praise.   We're on about trial 15 here.  She's ignored the "off" warning twice and been timed out into her crate for 30-60 seconds.  She's a quick learner.
• Started installing a little recall.  When I'm sitting in the yard waiting for her to eliminate (which until yesterday only happened twice in any 24 hour period, so I've been spending considerable time doing this), started calling her name when she would wander back to the stairs and rewarding her with several bits of roast beef when she came to me.  At first this required quite a bit of prompting--she's learned that plastic bag crinkling noise predicts treats, so this was helpful.  After a few days of this, she's responding to her name most of the time.  I can call her from different parts of the house and could call her at the Greyhound play date this morning.   

Why I haven't been blogging.  Well, notwithstanding the stuff above, which has worked easily into my day without much in the way of real training time, my baby girl has had some fear issues surfacing in the last few days that I wanted to put my trainer hat on for and address sooner rather than later.  Primarily this is noise fear.  Annie not only won't take food but tries to flee when she hears almost any moderate to loud noise, especially if she's outside.  Motors like generators, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, etc. are the worst, but even a plastic trash can lid being dropped can do it.  She happened to be outside the first time a neighbor's lawn mower fired up, and I struggled to get her outside again at all for 2 days.  She might, of course, just acclimate to these kinds of noises on her own over time, but I don't want to take that chance, especially since once triggered, this fear was strong even if the sound was faint and distant.  So I went to work, which got in the way of my blogging time.  Here's what I've done so far:

• 1 training session per day (15 minutes) with my shredder, which sounds a bit like the problematic motors.  I started by turning on the shredder for a couple of seconds with Annie in another room and the door closed to muffle the sound, then coming out and giving her bits of chicken liver. Then I did this with the door open, then brought the shredder into the room with her.  She now approaches when she hears the shredder.  I'm going to start the same process with the vacuum cleaner today.  
• I found some motor sounds on the Internet, and play them at random intervals during the day and give her treats.
• When we are in the house, and she alerts on a motor noise she hears from outside, I get treats and feed her up.  She can now do this just a few feet from the outside door (it's a security/screen door so doesn't baffle the sound).  I'm hoping to get out onto the porch soon.  We've progressed from her fleeing into her crate in the back bedroom.
• In an ideal world where I could protect her from exposure to any sound that she wasn't ready for, I could just continue as above, but unfortunately, I can't prevent my neighbors gardening when my dogs are outside, or people behaving raucously--or pushing baby strollers (another worry) when we're on a walk.  In other words, her world is going to be full of scary things popping up for a while, so I'm going for more exposure and softening the blow.  What this means is one walk per day in a busy place and showering her with treats when anything worrisome appears.  Worrisome can be the people playing football at the waterfront park where we walked yesterday, tiny dogs barking at her, strollers, and of course, noisy motors of any kind.  I don't press her to approach.  I let her take her time and decide when she's ready to walk by, and we often retreat (when possible) until we get to a distance where she can take treats (the best indicator fear is not overwhelming), or if the scary thing is passing us, until it's far enough away so that she can take treats.  I also enlist everybody I can to give her treats.  (She's generally friendly toward people, but when the world is too intense for her, she's a bit wary of people too.)  We also do one very early morning walk at the Emeryville marina where it's likely to be very quiet, as I don't want her to develop a general association with walks as stressful.  

As I said above, she might just get over all this on her own, even if I did nothing special, but there's also the possibility that her fears could intensify and become associated with all kinds of otherwise pleasant things in her life, so I'd rather put the work now rather than take a chance on having to do lots more work later, with a lot misery for little Annie in between.

So that's our story for now.