April 17, 2009

I will summarize some things I have been doing with Dot the last few days

Yesterday I took Dot to the Castro Valley dog park. They have both a large and small dog park. I took her to the small dog park because I thought she would be challenging to the big dogs. She did great with the little dogs and seemed a lot more at ease. The only dog she was having a problem with was a herding dog mix that was fence fighting with the big dogs next door and Dot was joining in. I did stop her, of course, and tried to redirect her to another part of the park. The owner of that dog was not controlling his dog at all, so it was tough to constantly keep Dot away from him, and I didn't want there to be a fight if one of them didn't back down. I had her in there for about 20 minutes with it being pretty positive and then I took her out.

That same day, earlier at Hayward's Memorial Park, I worked Dot on a clicker and having Mercury in his crate. I brought the crate out and clicked and treated each time she displayed interest in the crate and checking out Mercury. She was doing great, but then got distracted by a vehicle that pulled up. I had her do it one more time with gusto, and then I stopped.

I also brought with me a small dried carcass that I found a couple of weeks ago. I had Dino touch it several times and then click and treat after each. He did it several times with gusto. I brought out Dot, and she was barely interested. She liked better the live squirrels that were moving around in the trees above us.

Oh, I almost forgot, I did a track with Dot at the downtown shopping center. I laid the track, which had a few turns, short legs and spacing from two, three and four feet. It had some curbs and dirt and concrete. It was aged one hour. When I got back from laying a track for Dino down at Bay Fair, I ran Dot through hers. She was dead on it and never lifted her head even when I lost the track when I was too far over. She quickly found it again and followed it again. She got the turns and even kept on the four foot spacing. I was pretty happy.