pups-date

A quick pups-date ... Sonic is loving his "training", I continue to do a lot of switching from treat to toy and toy to treat games with him, so far, so good. He has no problem going from treat to toy, he is enthusiastic about the toy as well as the treat. I used treat to teach him a new behaviour then when he master the trick, I will change the reward to toy instead of food.

this is one of my many favourite tricks SHY. This photo was taken by a good friend of ours Priscilla when she came to visit. Since then, Sonic does not need the tape on his nose anymore to perform a perfect shy trick :)

 this is "in the box" trick, to get him to aware of his four feet instead of the two front feet.

 Oh, and we love this, the Rocker Board ...

After training 5 shelties of my own to do agility, I knew our weakest contact is actually the see-saw and not the weave. So far, my successful ones are Sing, Titan and Sipzie. Saturn after so many years, he is still worried about the big bang and I think this applied to Sizzle too. He could be too small for a big drop, it probably hurt him but we never give up, we still continue to do our best.

I started to teach Sonic the big bang this week. I think it will be a good idea when he is young, I found the older you get, the harder to teach. We are not going into doing the full see-saw for a long long time but I just want him to learn not to be scared of the big bang. We continue doing the Rocker Board/Wobble Board ...

I raised the tip end of the see-saw about 6 inches and click & treat, I spent the first 5 minutes to get him to hit the see-saw and go from there. I spent 3 short sessions on Monday just to get him to get used to the banging noises, each session is not more than 5 minutes. By the end of the 2nd session, he was one confident little pup.

Then, I started to teach him the position, instead of him jumping off, I want him to have four paws on the plank, I don't mind him sitting or standing but I want the pause. Yesterday morning and this morning, we only did 3 on the left and 3 on the right and that's it. I think that is good enough for now but I am not going to push and rush as he is still developing. We may do that once a week from now on but at least he learned not to be scared. Here are our little clips from Day 1 ...

Sonic's early see-saw training, Lesson 1:

Lesson 2, getting confident with the big bang:

Lesson 3, reinforce the position:

 

Lesson 4 & 5, looking good :))))

On the other hand, Scara continues with her socialisation. She is getting braver each day. We still go out to meet a lot of noisy children at the schools before they break up for Summer holiday; also to walk at different parks to see different dogs ...