Door manners.
At present, our door routine looks like this: Maya auto-sits when Brian or I reach for the door handle. We open the door and look outside to make sure that a pack of coyotes is not carousing on our front lawn (hey, it happened once), then we open the storm door and release her from the sit. Maya goes through the door and then stands at the other end of the leash, looking up and down the street for interesting things.
I am working on changing that last part to an auto-redirect onto me (or Brian), where Maya will go through the front door, spin around, and wait at the step with her eyes fixed on us. It sounds fancy, like the sort of thing one does to show off how well-trained and compliant one's dog is, but it's really just one more thing to increase Maya's basic comfort...if leaving the house becomes a cue to focus her attention on me, then it becomes less of a cue for her to scan the environment and seek out things to worry about.
Here are two videos. I took the first before we started training, the second about five minutes later, after about five or six repetitions. Maya looks sort of subdued/apprehensive in both videos, which is entirely because she does not normally go through the front door with a camera right in her face (sorry kiddo!).
Before:
After:
Being left in the car.
Just like it sounds, and definitely the most difficult of the three. Maya does not like to be left in the car, perhaps especially if she's still able to see us. There are multiple reasons for this, but the upshot is that she tends to experience more emotional distress in the car than in any other regular location.
Have you noticed the anxious drool stains all along the top of this window?
Those are mementos of all the times you abandoned me in here.
At the moment, I am simply focusing on teaching Maya to eat food in the car while I stand directly outside that smudgy window. Some of the food is handed to her, some of it comes from a Manners Minder. Eventually, I'll start moving around and/or away, but for now, even eating a mouthful of breakfast takes Maya a significant amount of time and effort.
A more long-term solution may be to shop around for a crate that would fit into our back seat. I'd rather have Maya crated in the car anyway, but previous attempts proved that none of the brands we could find locally would both fit Maya and fit into our car. I may try again though, armed with a tape measure and ordering online.
Crossing her paws.
Every dog needs a repertoire of silly dog tricks to help while away rainy afternoons. This one is very easy to teach, and Maya is already well on her way to having it solidly down. Her gangly legs are so cute.
And that's it for this week. Many weeks, we do no formal training whatsoever, but it's always more fun to have a project or two in the works.
Excellent! Re-orienting after going through a door is one of those things I wish I would have known about when I first got Bella and Sunny. I use a quick and dirty method with my dog walking clients: Before I go in the house, I drop a few treats just outside the front door. When I come out with the dog, the dog is busy looking for treats on the door mat, which gives me a chance to lock the door without the dog pulling, and buys me a few seconds with reactive dogs. All of my client dogs learned this in just a few days.
ReplyDeletePlease keep posting videos of Maya! Her ears and nose are even better in motion than in still pictures :)