Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Sit, wrestle, sit, wrestle, sit...

I always like to start doing some positive training with my foster dogs and get them used to clicker training before they head home.  Little Apple has been working on this and does a great job with "sit" and is starting to master a "spin" trick. She's so smart that she'd easily know a lot more if she had a human around who was a bit more consistent with her training sessions. Now Salish is starting her training and has joined Apple during "school" time.

As usual, our short little training sessions can get kind of wild since I'm bad about training one dog at a time. Our house has an open floor plan and doesn't work very well for separating dogs. When I do train 1 dog it ends up with 1 dog working and 3-4 dogs barking and complaining that they want to work too.

What I hope for in a training session is something like the above photo: calm, focused dogs, earnestly sitting and watching me for cues.

What I get is more like this though.


Or even this.

But that's okay by me.  As long as we are all having fun and learning then it's all good. A great training session should always feel like fun for the dog and the human and this one was definitely fun.

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