The tricks are going well, Kenzie is finally "sitting pretty" on her own, it took her quite a while to have the confidence to try to balance herself. I am still working on a really strong paw swiping over the eyes/nose, I call it "shy?". She does it great while lying on her side, but we are working on it while sitting or standing now. She has "say your prayers" down! I think that is her favorite trick as of now, it is really cute.

Oh, so new news, I had to go pick Max up from his adopted family...=(  This is the little guy who had been deemed unadoptable, then we fostered him for 8 months (in which time he bit no-one), and then we found what we thought was a perfect home for him with a terminally ill woman about 30 min away. Well  it turns out that there were some things not reveled to me about her lifestyle and health issues that made Max not appropriate for her as a pet. So he bit her while I think she was pulling him off of someone else, and now she is afraid of him. So I picked him up on friday. She said that he was getting worse instead of better (which of course he was, since he was not being aggressive at all when she got him). So I took him back with me. I was expecting to have a very stressed out puppy on my hands, but he really wasn't. He is pretty chill, and has not so much as raised a lip at the other dogs, which is HUGE.  So anyway, I am now taking him back to square one of people reactivity training, and we are going to be using the BAT method. He is getting clicked for having the courage to look at the guest right now, and that seems to be working well, because he actually tries to trick me by turning his head toward the guest, but not looking with his eye balls! Silly boy. But this tells me a lot, that it is difficult for him to look at the guest. He is a lot more uncomfortable than he seems (his mo is to run up to guests and roll on his back to be petted, but then gets spooked and turns into attack mode). People think, oh look how friendly he is! But really he just needs to be ignored until he is comfortable enough to ask for his head to be petted (then if he does get scared, he does not feel trapped like when he is on his back). Anyway, he is being a really good boy so far. I was afraid that he would be back to square one, peeing all over the house and attacking my dogs again, but he isnt! WHEW! lol

Oh, and I got my large stuffed dog! It is FREAKY!!! It feels and looks like a real dead dog. It worked well for my reactive client, we were able to see of the dog was friendly and was just a frustrated greeter, or if she was actually afraid and reactive. It turns out she was just a frustrated greeter, which has totally different training than reactive dogs, but the behavior looks identical (crazy barking and lunging at end of leash). So that was pretty cool. I will be using it tomorrow in my reactive dog class, doing BAT.

Oh, and other new news (boy I am just full of it today!) I took Kenzie to her first agility trial this weekend. It was indoors and pretty large, held in an arena. It took us about 2hrs to get in the doors, doing the zen down when she started to get stressed. Once we got inside she did not do too well, so we left for about an hr. When we came back, she was much more calm. We were actually able to get all the way inside, and settle on the outside of the ring and watch the dogs run, while surrounded by other dogs! That was sooo cool. I could not have gotten there though without the "zen down". It worked wonders to help her trust me to protect her.

Here is my recipe for dog treats, I finally wrote it down as I was making them! Unfortunately for anyone who is trying to repeat one of my "creations", I am a throw-it-together, we-dont-need-no-stinking-measuring devices, kind of person. But I did finally buckle down and write things out as I did them.

Things you need:
Ground Turkey Meat: 5.25lbs
Oats: 4 Cups
Bone Meal (optional): 1.25 cups
Powdered or Minced Garlic: 2 Tbsp
Freezer baggies

You want a ratio of 1 cup of flour to 1lb of ground meat. You can make the flour whatever you want. I use ground oats and bone meal for my dogs, but you could just as easily make it out of wheat flour, it just would not be quite as healthy.

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Grind up oats in food processor until in a flour-like texture, pour to a very large bowl. Add human grade bone meal powder and garlic and mix well. Then add the raw, ground turkey meat. Mix mix mix until all of the flour is mixed in with the meat. It will seem too dry and impossible, but just keep mixing! You can stop when there is no more free flour in the bottom of the bowl or the outside of the meat ball.

Press into a cookie sheet until flat the the thickness that you want. I do not grease my cookie sheet as the meat is greasy enough. Cook at 350 until when you take a fork and look at the middle of the center of meat and it looks cooked. For my 5.25lbs it took approx 25 min. Let cool for about 30 minutes, or until cool enough to handle safely. 

Once cool enough, cut into the size you want for treats, and fill freezer baggies with them. I cut the whole thing, then use a spatula to remove from tray and put into baggies. I then just pull them out of the freezer when I need them, and if I do not use them all, it goes into the fridge to be used the next day. It will usually keep about a week in the fridge.

So, I have been pulling my hair out trying to make the trkman method of Running Contacts work for us. It has been 6 months, 3 of which I worked on it very diligently. I did not know what I was going to do, when a completely new method came to me (as far as I know its new, anyway). It seems so obvious, but simple in regards to training theory. While I was excited to try this new method, a part of me thought that it was pointless, because who am I? How could I come up with my own method that is better than all of the methods created by such wonderful trainers all over the world? But then I went to Bible Study this morning, and was reminded of the verse: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me". I know that I was called (meant to) to train Running Contacts, so is it so hard to believe that God would show me the way to train them??? Duh! I have decided to call myself: Mandy Miller Christian, and this method the Christian Method. This is to remind myself that I did not come up with it, Christ just chose to reveal it to me.

So that is all I am going to say about it as of right now. The rainy season just hit, so it is going to be interesting working out in the rain all fall =)

So, I just got Susan Garrets DVD 2x2 weaves, and I am ready to get started! She says that you can  teach a dog to weave 12 poles in 12 days, so I am ready to put it to the test! I actually am not surprised by this, if you and your dog are shaping savvy. So I am very excited to get started and see how it goes.

Kenzie did great at our group class last week. I was thrilled that by the end of class, she was actually calm enough to be able to demonstrate how to be shaped for new behaviors.

Her teeter behavior is looking FANTASTIC! Holding the treat at the end of the board is causing a very fast run to the end of the board, then she slams on the breaks to hold her 2o2o. I will try to get a video of it soon.

Update on Kenzie's reactivity training post-vacation...she is fine! A little more reactive to the sound of dogs barking than she was before, but that I can handle =)  We are still able to go to the dog park and be social...HUGE. I have a new dog training class starting tomorrow that I intend to use Kenzie in as a demo dog, we will see how it goes! I have never been able to use her in any of my classes before because she was way too reactive and required 100% of my attention any time there were dogs within sight. SO, I am a little nervous, especially since Steve is out of town and cannot come along as a backup handler, should things not go as planned.

Ok, back to the Running Contacts topic. So I have not commented on our RC training all summer, and that is because we have not been training them! In the move from CA to OR, I did not have the DW for a while, and then once I did, I was just too focused on the reactivity training to be able to be fully invested in that. Not to mention, the fact that there are so many dogs surrounding our house made it very difficult for her to be able to focus on DW behavior. She would be just too stressed about the dogs on the other side of the fence.

Now that Kenzie is doing so much better with her reactivity, I am able to pull back from that a little and devote time to something else...AGILITY!!!! We are doing so great. We have our full sized teeter now, so she is on that and doing wonderfully. We are still working on getting her a little faster to the end, rather than creeping down, but she is doing very well sticking her 2o2o (two on two off). We did this by lowering our old teeter down to very low, and getting the 2o2o behavior I want on that. THEN raising it back up to where she was before. So we conquered the fear of big moving thing first, got as high as I could on our old teeter, then lowered it back down to get the exact behavior I wanted.

RC Dogwalk: Ok, so after getting very frustrated these last few weeks trying to figure out how to get her back to hitting the contact zone (because she had gotten into the habit of jumping it due to a misunderstanding on my part of the trkman method), I have started her back on one plank work, just with the plank up about 12", resting on the other down plank of the DW. This is working well so far, using the ball and double throws with lots of praise when she gets it right, and ball but no comment and straight back on the board for another try when she misses. This is what we were doing at the end of the spring while we were still in CA, but once we came down here, she was just too distracted to be able to concentrate on her end of contact behavior. She is doing much better now (partly because we moved the DW to a better part of the yard), and I am hoping that it will work out this time. If it doesnt, I dont know what I am going to do. I am hoping to be ready to trial come Jan, when we go back down to CA.

So, after the last post, we had about one week before going on our 2 week vacation in Hawaii...a vacation that we were not able to take the dogs on. During that last week of training we were able to take Kenzie into the dog park to run around with other dogs one other time, and that went wonderfully! There were five dogs in the park when we first went in (after the initial warm-up/meet and greet through the dog park fence of course), but two dogs were in the process of leaving, so that left us with three dogs. Kenzie was having a great time talking one of the other owners into throwing the ball for her when a new family showed up. I at first was going to ask them to wait a moment before entering, to give me a chance to take my dog out of the yard, but then I recognized the dog as one that we had met many times before and I knew was friendly. I decided to risk it and see how Kenzie did with a face to face introduction with no warm up. She ran over to say hi to me, then realized that there was a new dog that she had not checked out yet. She got tense and her head and ears went up, as did Wally's, but it only lasted a second and then they were sniffing each other and then no longer interested in each other...perfect! What is really great is that a puppy went up to wally a few minutes later and did something that Wally did not like, because we all heard him shout in doggie language "get out of my space!". Why does this make me so happy? Because it tells me that if Kenzie had broken "doggie code" in her greeting with Wally, he would have responded in an obvious way, as he did with the puppy.

Now we have been gone for about two weeks, and are picking the dogs up today from my family who watched them for us. I am interested to see how much we have regressed. I am fully expecting it, but I am hoping that it is minimal, and that I can keep her from going way over threshold and us having to go back to music 24/7...I just dong think I can do that again!

So after 10 days of being on the program, we had to travel otu of town, then I ended up getting really sick, so it was a total of a month that the training was put on hold...and boy were we sorry! It was like the first 10 days of training never happened. I had not realized how much she had regressed, so the first time I took her out for a training session she went way over threshold 3 times, and we had one miserable dog on our hands: now afraid of all sounds slightly out of the ordinary, and even worse, terrified of the lights of cars on the road (which have never been a problem before). So, as you can imagine, we were also miserable: no sleep, all of the windows and glass doors shut out completely so that even light from cars could not get through, explosions from her every time she went outside to potty, and music blaring 24hrs. But, the night of the third day, our calm and happy dog finally returned to us =). Since then she had another 10 day challenge, then was put on every-day/ every-other-day, for the last two weeks. This past week we have seen a HUGE change in her. We can finally watch movies/tv without her blowing up at least once because of a sound effect of a dog, horse, cow, odd sound, etc. Now, if she notices at all, we just tell her to get her toy and we throw it for her a few times to work out the frustration. After the 10 day challenge I let her meet a few dogs in the dog park: always getting warmed up outside the fenced area by chasing her ball, while closely watching the dogs in the park, and her body language toward them. If I felt like it might be a good match (usually a happy indifferent dog who was very interested in the tennis ball but would come up to the fence to say hi with a calm expression), I would let Kenzie say hi to the dog through the fence. If she decided to be nice and wag her whole body with friendly submissive ears, then we would go inside for the dogs to meet and play ball. This had happened four times in the past 2 weeks. Today we had a breakthrough because a dog barked at her quite aggressively through the fence when we were pretty close, and she did not even flinch. Also, we ended up going in the dog park with these two nice aussies, but then the owner grabbed one of the dog's collars and held her against her knees, and when kenzie went over to say hi, the dog started snapping and growling at kenzie because she felt cornered. I asked the lady to let go of her dog since it was making her be aggressive, and when she did, the dog was fine.  What I loved about that interaction was that kenzie actually had a dog face to face with her snapping and growling, and kenzie just lifted a lip and took a step backward, good girl!!!!! Counting the first 10 day challenge when we first came to Oregon this spring, we have been in reactivity training for 5 weeks, only 3.5 weeks since the month break and three days of misery.

So, it has been a little over a month since I was out of my mind with frustration over Kenzie's reactivity to other dogs. Once we got to our house in Oregon (shortly after the last post) we had a very hard time getting her to sleep through the night. It took 7 days of loud music playing all night and all day to get our first "stress session" free night. I was so excited, I woke up thinking "I slept through the WHOLE NIGHT!!!!". Since then we still sleep with a fan running for some background noise, but that is all. There are a lot of dogs in our neighborhood, so that is fine with me. Once she was sleeping fairly well and not jumping at every small noise, I took that as a sign as her being ready for a training session. The way it ended up working for us was: 7 days lock-down. Training session, then full day of rest, training session, then full day of rest, training session, then full day of rest, training session, stressed in the evening, but then slept well that night, so we had another training session the following day. I was able to work with her every day on something from then on, unless she started being jumpy again, then she would get a day off of training. We have not gotten to the place where we can go to the dog park and she is not very interested in the dogs there as long as we keep some distance between her and the fence. We have even gone in the dog park with other dogs once, when the dogs were really  nice and she seemed okay with them after a while of chasing her ball at a comfortable distance. We let them meet on opposite sides of the fence, Kenzie looked relaxed and friendly, so we went inside! I was pretty nervous, but it was great, I just threw her ball and she chased after it, while letting the dogs sniff her when they came over. She was a little possessive of THEIR toy, but that is a whole other kettle of fish!

So, yesterday after the huge affair in the middle of the night when we had to turn the musical back on, etc, Kenzie only barked one time all day, and that was at 9am. It was not a full throttle bark, instead of the usual "oh my gosh! I just geard something that is going to eat me, I just know it!!!!!!" bark, it was more of a "I think I just heard something, but I'm not sure, so I'm just going to bark to be on the safe side". From when I got up at 6am, she was on a new program...since we had not been successful in getting her to not react for even half of a day up to that point, I decided that things needed to change. I found a classical XM radio station that we could tune into and leave running, rather loud, all day and all night: it never got turned off. I also turned a radio on in every room, so that if Kenzie went in it, there would be something to drown out any sounds that might cause her to react. We stayed inside for most of the day, only going outside to potty as few times as possible, and I made sure to keep Max on a leash as well as Kenzie, so that there was no chance of him running and chasing something, causing her to react. By that evening, I saw a HUGE difference in her! Steve came home and turned on the TV (ok, I guess the music did stop for a short time while he watched his show), a commercial came on and dont you know, the very first sound was a dog barking. I jumped up saying "What a good girl! Push mute, push mute!" as I ran to grab a handful of dog food to give her. Up until this point, her reaction to unknown sounds was: react first, see what it is later. Well this was obviously: listen, decide whether it is a threat, respond if needed, response. This is HUGE. I saw it again this morning when we went outside to get worn out. After we played for a while, I noticed that there were a LOT of birds flying around, right over out heads, chirping their little heads off, and Kenzie was just lying down beside me, flicking her ears around listening, but NOT tense!!!! She was back to her usual outside behavior: hang out and enjoy the sights. So we stayed outside for a while, just enjoying the pretty weather. I kept her on leash, but Max was mean to Riley, so he got put back inside, and then Riley was running the yard free. Well, Riley ended up barking at random things a few times, and I was shocked, but Kenzie did not jump up barking like I expected! She sat up and listened, but when I told Riley that it is okay, and that he should come lay down, she flopped right back on her side again, as if she did not have a care in the world. Unfortunately our neighbor who owns the cows next to us came over, and got the cows all riled up, causing both Riley and Kenzie to bark at him/them, while I drug her back in the house. But, once we were back inside, she was calm again, and did not seem to be on edge. This was about 10am, so this meant that we went a full 24hrs without any kind of reaction (our first full night of sleep, yay), and as a result, she calmed down considerably. She did bark when I pushed pause on the music to answer the phone, but I am not sure why. This tells me that the incident with the cows did stir her up some, but I do not think that it undid all of the work we did yesterday, it just set us back a little. We will see how she reacts when I let her outside next.