Less Offensive

While Asher has not had a lot of fans with other dogs, I must say he’s been very good with my cats overall. He occasionally chases a cat, but just out of puppy boisterousness, and the cats don’t seem to take it personally or feel threatened at all. They feel very comfortable around him, sleep on the bed with him at night and basically just find him completely unobjectionable. And this is meaningful, as Dragon wanted to KILL Fig for some reason. You don’t want an angry 20 pound cat coming after you, let me tell you that. So it’s been nice to have such a smooth transition with the cats anyway.

Speaking of Dragon, we have really become good friends recently. I don’t know if it’s time or what, but he’s just become so affectionate lately. He likes being picked up, he wants pets and sits on my lap. He is still flighty and suspicious, but nothing like he used to be. Out of all the cats he’s now the most cuddly. Fizban can also be cuddly, but not to the extent that Dragon is these days. I thought it might be a weird phase, but Sweet Dragon seems to be here to stay, and I approve. Marvin is now the most standoff-ish, as he never really recovered from his weird personality change when he got that rabies vaccination. But he’s still cute and sweet – and, hey, look at Dragon – one never knows what might happen in the future!

They all continue to be great buddies, despite the size difference with Marvin and the maine coons. I really do enjoy cats, even the weird ones. Mine seem happy, I try to give them a lot of things to do throughout the day. I have all relatively young cats at the moment. Fizzy is the oldest at 6, which is nothing in the world of cats. I’ll have these guys, hopefully, for a long time.

And the dogs seem to continue to soften towards Asher. He’s just not as offensive as he used to be. They now act he’s just like … a normal dog. Just any other dog that we happened to have in household, even when he’s obnoxious they’re not doing the over the top displays of dislike. Haku now just gives him the same growling ‘rumble’ that he does to Navarre when Asher steps on him or tries to get his toy. Navarre is just like, “Whatever.” And does his own thing while puppy does his. And Bright and Asher have suddenly become really good friends! The other day they spent the whole day playing, running around and chasing each other in the backyard, wrestling and having such a good time. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me! Bright will still tell him off, and HARD, he will scream and flip on his back and she won’t let him up for a minute or two (she does no damage whatsoever). But, for the most part, so much progress with everyone.

Not a lot of training this week, we were off at the beach and all the dogs very much enjoyed themselves on this longer trip. Asher did great, I didn’t even need to bring in a crate this time, he behaved himself. He also proved to be a lot less annoying than the adult dogs. I don’t usually have all of them free in my parent’s house at once, as they get SO excited and act like nutcases. But we went ahead and did it this week and it was, well, pandemonium. Except for Asher, who just lay around and chewed on bones. Haku was stalking cats, stalking other dogs and obsessively squeaking every toy he could find. Bright and Navarre just need ALL the love from ALL the people and won’t fricken leave you alone. They have no concept of coffee tables (which I don’t have at home) and kept leaping over the couch like they were in the olympics. Navarre counter surfs and Bright has to drag every toy in the house everywhere. And just forget about trying to watch a movie with them around, they are like a whirlwind. And let me point out, they are NOT like that at home! But they are obnoxious little buggers in company.

Anyway, we DID introduce stacking a ring onto a cone with Asher, and he picked it up in one session! Now, admittedly he already knew the hard part, which is picking up and holding an object, but he seemed to get the concept of the ring onto the cone quite quickly. I wouldn’t call it trained though, when he gets too excited it’s cones flying everywhere. We also attempted to work on his sit-pretty on his small platform – he gets SO frustrated with trying to get his body cooperate. Fiddly things like rings onto cones, no problem – but getting all those legs organized onto a platform, SO HARD for him. Still, he finally had that lightbulb moment where he started using his core instead of just flinging himself upwards. There is still a lot more feet flinging than I’d like, but considering he’s not a very coordinated guy, we’ll take it. What I found impressive was after we worked on that a little we were doing cue discrimination. So I back him up and then ask him to usually sit, down or wait (in a stand), and sometimes wave. Today I backed him up across the room and asked for a wave and he started trying to throw a sit-pretty! Now, that’s not what I want him to do when I ask for a wave, but it was impressive anyway.

We had a herding lesson with Dave this week, and just did Navarre as we had just come back from the beach and had already gone hiking that morning – I thought Haku could use a break. Mostly we did a lot of talking as I get struck by the inability to do anything with Navarre because everything is wrong. I understand consistency, intellectually I completely understand why it’s so important to make sure you get what you want to see otherwise you are telling the dog that what they are doing (which is incorrect) is what they should do. However, I also am a shaper, I understand in the learning process things are not going to look perfect and that’s okay to take less than perfect to help the dogs make progress towards what you want to see. So in my mind, Navarre is NOT trained, he does NOT understand what the cues are supposed to mean so when I don’t get perfection, but I get a good attempt, I go with it. This just isn’t working for Navarre when he’s working with me. He’s definitely a ‘give an inch take a mile dog’. And not just in herding, but it doesn’t affect us as much in other places.

So Navarre works best with Dave, who has been 100% consistent with him from day one in what he expects. Me and Ian, not so much. Navarre knows that, with Dave, the cues mean what the cues mean – and Navarre will fix it when he’s told he’s wrong (which does not involve yelling on Dave’s part). Navarre does attempt to ‘cheat’ sometimes, but he’s not ridiculously pushy like he is with Ian and me, and it’s because of consistency. Now, on the other hand, Navarre is mentally just exhausted after working for like 10 minutes with Dave. You can see, he literally looks dazed and he’s just gone – it’s SO HARD for him. So they can’t actually work very much at all, because actually thinking about what he’s doing is way harder than arguing with people (which he can apparently do all day long). It’s just fascinating to watch his little ears, which are back towards Dave the whole time, really trying to LISTEN.

Then when I try to work Navarre EVERYTHING he does is wrong. Even just setting up next to me is wrong, he doesn’t come all the way in he keeps lying down ahead of me instead of where I asked he doesn’t leave my feet correctly on the outrun, he doesn’t bend out like he should, he doesn’t slow down on his lift, he doesn’t lay down when I ask, he doesn’t flank when I cue it, he doesn’t steady when I ask, he doesn’t respond to his ‘there’ … there is nothing there. And sometimes we can scramble through things, but it’s pointless as we’re not working together at all. And it comes back to when we started in herding and I never COULD get him to give an inch from the sheep. Circle, circle, circle – always too close, too fast. We couldn’t do the ‘first’ step, so it doesn’t surprise me that, magically, we can do more.

Now, admittedly we haven’t really practiced together, on our own. Which may help or hurt, because I don’t think I do well with trying to make everything ‘perfect’. But it’s possible we may make some progress if I can implement my plan to practice at least once a week. Or maybe not. We have a history. And he’s a hard dog for me in herding.

I have a different vision of how I want to progress with Asher. As in every sport, it does come back to foundation. So hopefully I can do a better job of putting a good foundation on Asher, with an idea of what I want the finished product to look like and knowing that it’s REALLY important to me that we work as a team out there. Haku lacked the skills, Navarre lacks the teamwork, maybe Asher will benefit from their experience.

Asher of no teeth, good lord! His molars have all fallen out and there are no adult teeth coming in yet! So food literally just falls out of his mouth. He’s also bulked out some, as have his siblings, they now have more body to go with those long, long legs. That’s a relative term, of course. Went hiking with sister Flea this week, very interesting turn of personality where she is now become super ‘grovely’ with the adult dogs, much like Dove is. Flea was so hardcore I found it surprising to see that in her. Now, the adult dogs don’t LIKE this, but you can’t really get mad at a dog groveling at you. She was also obsessively flinging herself at me as well, not really to greet, but just didn’t know what to do with all the excitement. Asher and Flea continue to get better together, only one incident where Flea pinned Asher, mostly it was Asher most definitely being obnoxious to her, and now Flea was being way more tolerant. Mostly they were good together though, hopefully they will fade from the obsessive bitey face and become good friends.

Navarre and Robert ran in the agility competition I put on over the weekend, Navarre was happy to do so, but surprisingly kept running to me after their runs were over. Navarre was wide, did I mention he was one if you give him an inch? We are entered in one day of an AKC trial in September, and then we’ll do a full USDAA and maybe something else in October. We’ll start to get back into our agility groove next week. Maybe I will stop and reward my foundation behaviors – you know, like maybe collection. Shocking thought.

As for Asher, some things we need to work on:

• Heeling (both sides)

• Recall to Heel

• Sit Pretty

• Back Up a Wall

• Side Legs

• Rear Leg Lifts

• Side Pass

• Sit to Stand Platform Squats

• Circle an object

• Bow

• Station with Agility

• Scent Articles

• BRUSHING

The last is ridiculous, all the dogs got a lot of burrs in their coats hiking this week, which was not a problem to brush them out of the adult dogs. Still can’t even TOUCH a brush/comb to Asher. You can use your FINGERS to pull the burrs out, and, once again, zero issues with nail trims, I can handle him all over – but do not even get NEAR him with anything brush like. My first plan of ‘just ignore it until he forgets about whatever weirdness is freaking him out’ does not seem to be working. He will now at least not hide behind the table when I’m brushing the other dogs. Now, keep in mind, I’ve never actually ever brushed him, he never had a bad experience or any reason for this behavior – and I haven’t seen him react to anything else like this other than being sprayed with the tick spray. When he first arrived we did just some cursory quick brushes just to expose him and he was fine, but for some reason by the time we attempted it again, he just flipped.

So the question is, is there actually something truly aversive about brushing with him, or is it just a big thing he’s now built up in his mind? As I have barely touched him with a brush, I tend to think he’s just built up some weird thing about it and now he’s just given himself a phobia. So I’m not entirely sure how to approach this without making it worse, or having that extreme dislike carry over to other things. I don’t want him to start worrying about training because he associates it with The Evil Brush. Or cuddling with me or anything else. This reminds me of Navarre’s extreme dislike of people blowing ‘raspberries’ at him, which I never did fix that issue, though I CAN blow raspberries at him in a lot of situations now, but not at home. Contemplating, this is not my area of expertise.