Part 4 - Using force free training to work through the dreaded nail trim

When Catty throws her sit pretty you know she's excited! 

In all the previous posts Catty was always offering her right paw.  That's just fine and it actually worked to my advantage in terms of keeping me on track. I'm not sure why she favors her right paw and it really doesn't matter - what does matter is that I move at her pace when we start working on her left paw.

So, after the right paw was all clipped, I moved onto working with her left paw.  We did the same exact thing as the right foot - targeting the pod and duration.

Then it got interesting with her giving me her paw... she's not real comfortable with this when you watch her head and ears.   She can move away at any time and she choses to stay.  But, we have work to do around touching of her left paw.

It's really important to pay attention to your dog, adjust your expectations and go back a few steps if needed. By doing this Catty and I will progress quicker and we will still have fun.

Catty and I continued on working with just left paw touches and you can see she's doing great.  I also did some touches outside of the training session - while we were on the couch and reinforce her when I'm touching her paw.

And then we started working both left and right toe touches

We were making really great progress so I thought it was a good time to introduce the clippers to her left paw.

This next step we spent a good amount of training on and as you can all this prep work has paid off. 

Ta-da we have a left nail clip!

All of our success was due to paying attention to Catty during each step and me being flexible with our progress.

Love my silly Catty girl for all she teaches me!

Here's a great article on Patterns, Dogs, and Learning