K continues working...

Mealtime is a wonderful place for K to continue her work around trusting us humans.  And lucky for her and us, this happens twice a day so a good amount of practice happens.

K's meal

As you've been following K, you saw that in the beginning we were gently tossing treats/her meals to her.  She quickly began to associate that the scary humans are offering something pretty good.  As K began to feel at ease with this method I began introducing hand feeding.  I was still mixing up the tossing of the kibble with the hand feeding.  This allowed her a release in pressure by moving away from me, as she took risks with coming close to take food from the palm of my hand.

 

Last night and this morning we have introduced the concept of "touch".  When she touches my hand with her nose, I mark this with a "yes" and then she gets the kibble.   I will eventually mark this with the word touch but, that's a down the road.

 

This is a big deal for her and I love her bravely and willingness to take this next step with us.

 

Notice that I'm using all 3 methods: tossing the treat, hand feeding and the touch.  It's important to help her succeed and this happens by going back to something that she's comfortable with and it keeps her interested in our work together.

 

Again, this really doesn't take much time and the payoffs are huge! While K continues to be skittish, each day we are witnessing her trust us just a little bit more.  It's actually pretty amazing where she is today vs. her first day with us on May 25th.

 

I've included video of K's whole meal so you can see just how long this takes.