I learned more than Milo did this week.

Stay

We worked on stays at home and on a field where we regularly play and train. I ended up using medium rather than small distractions. They included: opening the fridge, throwing a toy around in front of him, dropping a chicken wiener in front of him, and at one session another dog came to our field and played frisbee with its person for a while.

He didn’t break a single stay! Next week we’ll try for three minutes.

Cleaning up his toys

For this trick Milo goes through the house collecting his toys and putting them in his toy box. We’ve been working on this for a while.

We didn’t make any progress for the first part of the week, so I took some time to sit back and think about what we were doing.

I realized I was messing up by asking him to do figure out two things at once. I was asking him to (1) get the idea that he has to clean up all of his toys, and (2) get the idea that he needs to clean up his toys in all the rooms. So, I scaled back to laying out a few of his toys in one room, and gradually increasing the number of toys (all in the same room) that I was asking him to clean up.  After he gets the hang of cleaning up all the toys in one room, we’ll add rooms one at a time.

This trick is teaching me to break up training into little bits, use my markers more accurately, and discipline myself about when I use words and when I use gestures as cues.

Milo did better after I cleaned up my act. Next week, more toys, but still in the living room.

Heel Position

This is going fine.  The next week it will be correct position for three steps.

I didn’t get finished with The Power of Training Dogs with Markers., so that stays on my training to-do list as well.

What we did: