When we first got Shiloh we did training with him with a trainer one and one to make sure we got off to a good start. We met with her once a week. Her name is Sandra Mannion. We are pretty sure her training is as much for the dog as it is for the handlers. Our big focus early on was sit, down, come (recall) and heel. The biggies needed to navigate in the world with birds, squirrels and crazy people on the street who insist on speaking to your dog in a high pitched voice without even acknowledging your presence, sorry that’s a peeve of mine for another day. I wouldn’t say we have these mastered but we have made major improvements. Then we worked on teaching Shiloh to look at our eyes instead of our hands where the treat normally is located. We taught him that by showing him we had food in both hands and then holding our hands out to our sides. He looked back and forth from hand to hand while drooling until he eventually looked at our eyes which was rewarded. This moves up to airplane where you move your hands like a bird creating an additional distraction. That has helped quite a bit and now we are going to work on improving that even more while in a heel. We love playing recall relay with him and I think he enjoys it too. We stand apart from each other at the park and at the beginning one of us would run up to him show him we had treats, run away and then call him to come, which he did with eagerness and excitement after the teasing. Now we do it without the teasing to teach him to come when he is called. We also do this with a whistle so that he learns that as well and this will work at longer distances if we ever decide to let him off leash while camping. Also since Gogi can do it we wanted Shiloh to learn sit from the down position so we have been working on that and he gets it about 60% of the time with no body movement cues, if he doesn’t do it on just verbal than we lead him with the treat to get up and sit. The other one I like is a down from a standing position. When you are training a dog I think its as much you staying interested and having fun as the dog being food motivated. Recently we transitioned to meeting with the dog trainer only once a month, so that we can stay fresh without going broke for our dogs benefit. So we haven’t seen Sandra for several weeks which has meant when we saw her today we had lots of questions and updates. First off I decided I wanted to teach Shiloh to shake. So I of course google’d it and read that you say, “Shiloh, shake”. Then you pick up his paw, say “Good shake” and then give him a treat. The website said most dogs will get it in 20 mins… well not this dog. If I had a nickel for every time I said “Good shake” in the last week I would be at Starbucks right now sipping one of those new Toffee Mocha’s. So I inform Sandra of my recent shake training and she lets me have my efforts and she says let me try something. She put food in her hand and put in on the ground and Shiloh tried to check it out while in a down. For I think at least 5 minutes he nudged her hand with his muzzle, licked her, looked at her and repeated. She said that he was unusually not using his paws. Well he finally pawed at her hand and he was rewarded. It took him a while but then he pawed again, and then again, it looked like a really cute version of sweet soft Shiloh whack a mole. Then she raised her hand a little bit of the ground and he eventually figured out to try pawing at that and now he is pretty close to a high five or shake when you hold your hand up to him. It will take more work for him to be fluent but I am pretty excited to have a new trick in our bag. The other things we have been doing based on my google research is when he yawns we say “are you sleepy?” and when he stretches with his hind legs up and front legs down we say “take a bow”. I read on the internet that they will eventually associate these things with the words and do them on command. Sandra doesn’t think so but she did show us how to teach him take a bow which we will work on after we learn high five. Conveniently I think high five has mixed everything up because then tonight he was having problems understanding the sit command, ugh. We are also going to work on stay and wait two biggies for getting out the door calmly for walks and also while out in the world. Boy what did we do before the dog? I am not quite sure where I directed this energy before. Anyway he is lots of entertainment and fun about 98% of the time. The other 2% we spend pulling to meet other dogs, chasing birds, and trying to see what strangers passing by have in their bags, we are going to work on shoring that up as well. That’s all for now, thank you, thank you very much.
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