With our longer light filled days, I'm doing more work outside with Viva. This outside work has to do with hearing/seeing dogs. Since Viva has been in foster care she has really struggled with hearing or seeing dogs that she isn't familiar with. For the first 5 months with us, Viva was not able to go to the bathroom in our backyard because of the dog who lives behind us. She would get so obsessive about hearing the dog that she was not able to relax enough to go to the bathroom. So for a long time I had to load her into my car to get her somewhere "dog free" so that she could go to the bathroom. Back in December Viva and I had some training assistance from Lori Stevens. That helped a lot and got us on track with our training plan. Over the past couple of months we have done some great work and with our on going work, Viva is able to go potty in the backyard.
With nice warm days just around the corner, I want to begin to work with Viva around being out on our deck and hearing the dogs that live around us. We have a dog behind us and a dog next door.
We started our work with having our door open and the baby gate in place. In all of these short sessions, I'm very near Viva with high value food to us as a reward for behavior I'm after.
Next phase was to work out on the deck.
Here's Viva taking some time to rest on the deck.
Pretty girl giving me some wonderful behavior!
Something else we do out on the deck involves playing games with cue that the dogs are proficient in doing. All of my dogs know the cue "touch" so this is a fun game that can be done on the deck with the outside environmental distractors occurring. In the video's below, this isn't the most pristine training given I have all three dogs working at the same time. A better training set up would be to have one dog working at a time.
My goal in these video's is to get all three dogs focused on the cue of "touch" and not focused on what's going on around them.
As you will see, D'light is a very pushy boy when it comes to this training game.
Good girl Viva. She's is torn between the dog in the backyard behind us (she can smell that dog) and playing the game. And you can see she opts to play the game, again this is great!
Catty hears us playing and she's not one to miss out on training.
D'light again being so pushy and it makes me laugh. For those that know D'light, they would not describe him as pushy so it's actually nice to see this behavior in him.
And all three dogs are giving me a lot of attention which is what I was after during this session.
On a different day Viva relaxing on the deck.
Again really great behavior since she could hear the kids out playing next door.
Catty doing her own relaxing on the deck.
D'light decides resting inside is where he wants to be.
Good work to prepare for warm summer days out on the deck!
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