Friday afternoon/evening stuff

Upon going out for break just before lunch, we went out and Rei did#1 pretty quickly, as she hadn't gone that morning. So as we were headed in, we had a back up of dogs at the door to go in, so I went to have her sit and stay. Again she is refusing to sit for me when I say SIT! I'm thinking man, how am I going to get through to this dog and I absolutely hate yanking on that leash to correct her like I'm having to do to make her sit and as I was being instructed to do. So I go through the serious of commands, no, correct, command again and we'd done this three times and each time she was backing up on me.

Valerie, who'd been working with another person and thier dog, came up and said Hey, couple of things happening here. First off, I was pulling back to make the correction, which was causing her to back up, that I needed to pull straight up when doing a correction. Secondly, she said try changing how you say the command to sit. Instead of saying SIT!, real quick and sharp, she said to enunciate and draw out the "s" sound and with a sharp ending on the "t", as in SSSSSSSSSSIT! I give it a try, and what do you know, she plops right down in a sit! LOL!

So we head on in to the room and I think now in the last 24 hrs, she's only not sat for me twice when doing it this way. We are doing almost no corrections anymore, which is making BOTH of us a LOT happier. :) I feel quite like a horses butt though, having been yanking the poor dog's head off, but now we are making some real progress! :)

After lunch, we met up in the gathering area to do bus work, outside walks, and for those to finish stair work if they hadn't gotten it yet. Suzi and I went and hung out in the leather lounge so we could chat and after Suzi did her outdoor work, they came in and grabbed me to head up to the front to do the bus and van work. We head up to the gathering area and find a seat. Lisa took us both onto the bus and the van and then went and did the walk down and around the block behind the school doing leash guiding. She came back and we went in and it was time for feed/water/break.

We did so and went down for dinner and then went down to the leather lounge for our evening lecture. The lecture was about Straight line and conditioning, meaning explaining how they conditioned the dogs with positives and praises first and then trained them to follow the imaginary straight line down the middle of the sidewalk. Dan gave the lecture and while he's a great guy, it seems he's really nervous. :( A couple of the other more experienced trainers seem to step in and really override him a lot, even devaluing him even more, which is a little disheartening. As a result, Suzi was unable to hear, not much was repeated and so forth, so it was a little frustrating to me, for her. But they did come up to us after the lecture and went through things again to make sure she understood.

After lecture, Suzi and I went to the snack lounge and talked to great lengths about quite a few things and in general. :) Then I came back to the room and checked some emails and tried to start this post, but was too tired so figured I'd finish it later.