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.