Bad Blogger!

I haven't been keeping up with this lately. But I have good reason. At the end of October we had our open house here and we stayed very busy getting ready. Then the last couple of weeks have been so rough that for a while Vivre very nearly became an only child. My older dogs still aren't right. I am having to watch Yoda, my gsd mix and Apollo, my golden mix, when they are together. They had a huge fight and still aren't back on track yet.

Any way Vivre has always been ridiculously easy to shape. Even with the relatively little free shaping experience I have she picks things up so quickly. Making huge leaps over several small steps. I gave up on every being able to wear her down mentally with shaping, but I finally had a session where she tried things wrong! Okay why am I so excited? Because it means she finally has the chance to learn to keep trying new and different things when something doesn't work.

After years of saying "Why waste time training tricks? Train something useful." I am eating those words and looking for new stupid things to shape. Not only because it is more fun, I mean no pressure who cares if I mess it up? But because it helps Vivre learn to learn and to learn to use her body in a deliberate way. So I just stop and randomly shape things, like climbing straw bale. The other night I took her out and started working on getting her to go around an over turned bucket. This actually isn't completely useless since it will help with the blind search as she gets older, but the context will be different enough that I am not too worried that I will mess something up. It was the first time she couldn't figure out what I wanted. And trust me that doesn't imply exceptional shaping ability on my part. She is just that good. She tried walking up to the bucket and turning toward me, she tried sniffing it, heck she even tried lining up in heel position with the bucket. Actually she had better heel position with the bucket than she ever has with me. I did get her going all the way around it, but I was using treat delivery to help. By the end she would walk one circle around the bucket and come back to me. The light still never came on, but she was definitely having to work her brain to figure it out.

I have actually been getting more training done, but doing it all outside, but it is going to start getting too cold for that soon. I took some new pictures on flickr a few weeks ago, but they are very similar to the last. Though there were a few where she was actually standing still. I need to do better about posting. That hopefully will make me get on the ball. I also really need to start tracking again. I don't know why I dislike tracking. I think because I really have no idea what is going on in the dogs head. Or the dogs nose for that matter.