I have been feeling bummed lately that I just can’t keep up in the blogosphere…. I know it’s okay, but it’s still a disappointment. I love this blogging community and I love writing here, but work has been SO BUSY. Mornings and evenings and in-betweens always seem so frequently spoken for, too! Argh.
Anyway, I will keep trying! I have an early meeting today, so I’m skipping my Wednesday morning gym and have a few minutes now instead. Just know that I’m still here!!
Last Friday night Ivan and I went to the UW Badgers volleyball game. It was really fun! It was one of those things, as always happens, where when 5 p.m. rolled around and I was rushing to finish work and let the dog out and get ready to go, I thought, “Ugh, now I kind of don’t really want to go anymore. I’m tired…. I just want to drive to our Mexican restaurant and sit down and eat a bunch of tortilla chips with a margarita.”
But, we had the tickets, so obviously we went, and OBVIOUSLY once I got there, I was also very glad we went!! 🙂 Always the way…
I dug out an old Wisconsin t-shirt:
We had great free parking included with my friend’s season tickets, so that was awesome, too.
DANG these girls are good. I played volleyball from 5th grade- 12th grade and played Varsity level, etc and was pretty good back in the day. But not that level good! LOL! Super fun to watch.
The Badgers won, I sang along to Varsity (U-rah-rah Wisconsin!) and we watched Bucky Badger dance around. Always a fun trip down memory lane going to any UW-Madison (my alma mater) stuff.
THEN we went out for Mexican and I got my chips and margarita. 🙂
Sunday morning we had our first official “dog training session”. We decided, after procrastinating on this for too long, to invest in a package of private training sessions for Mr. Charlie.
He’s a good, very sweet boy! (The sweetest!!!) But he’s still young, and he has some “rough around the edges” behaviors that we’d like to work on. For him, this is mostly:
1) overexcitement when people come over (i.e. jumping up on people and clawing all over them). He’s not a big dog, but it’s still obnoxious!
2) overexcitement when he sees other dogs. He goes nuts and starts almost shaking in excitement and tries to pull me over to them. If he gets near another dog, he also goes berserk and tries to jump and climb all over them, too. In a friendly way, but it’s probably super annoying to other dogs to get clawed in the face, you know?! So I actually worry about letting him free with other dogs, out of fear that he’ll scratch their face and they’ll react back. (I typically don’t even let him approach other dogs, but want to work on more “indifference”/ continuing to just walk on by and not react to everyone/everything.)
3) general obedience stuff like improving his recall, and consistency/ duration of things he already knows. For example, he knows the commands “sit”, “down”, “come”, “wait”, and “go to your mat”, but it’s not solid where I could trust him to sit and wait while we have the door standing open unloading groceries or something.
4) He walks fine on a leash for about half of the time. The other half, usually the first half, he is always raring to go and pulls. So we want to work on that, too. Fortunately he’s small enough that he can’t actually really pull me around, but it’s annoying.
And then just other general manners. He’s so friendly and good, but sometimes when my niece and nephew come over, he gets overstimulated and excited and will jump on them and/or even nip a little at their clothes in excitement (doesn’t help that they inevitably start running and shrieking, etc. which eggs him on…).
My sister’s family is coming for Christmas, so I want to nip some of this in the bud and teach him ways to settle/ place on his mat/ etc to control some of these overexcitement type behaviors.
We bought a 5-pack of 45 minute sessions, plus an hour long intro session, for now. It’s rather pricey, so we’ll see if we extend or not… She gave us clickers and so far we’re just learning the basics of positive reinforcement training. He definitely “gets” the clicker already! We’re starting slow, but he’s already quickly learned a couple of new commands with it.
The hardest part for me is wrapping my head around it all, I think. It’s kind of a specific method- you have to try to “shape” their behavior using the clicker/ treats, by rewarding what you want to see and essentially ignoring what you don’t like.
(For example, when she comes over and Charlie jumps on her, she doesn’t say “down” or “no” or anything like that; she just completely ignores him jumping on her and pays no attention to him. Then, when at some point he’s got all 4 paws down on the ground, she turns on the praise and gives him lots of attention. “HIIII Charlie, oh what a good boy!!” So, in theory, he should learn, Hmm, ok, if I jump up, no one pays any attention to me at all. But if I stay down here on the ground, people talk to me and pet me and scratch my head and I get all this great attention! I think I’ll start staying down, since that’s the better option!)
We’re also supposed to randomly reward behaviors that we like, when we happen to catch him doing it. (e.g. If I’m cooking dinner and at some point he randomly lays down on his mat instead of hovering around at my feet (where I don’t want him), toss him a couple treats out of the blue, so he’ll learn, ok, this is a good spot. When I’m over here, I randomly get treats, this is something she likes, etc.)
Anyway, I feel like I have a lot of questions, especially about more complex behaviors, but we’ll see how it goes! We have another session tonight. My natural instinct is, of course, to say NO to things I don’t like or to otherwise just blatantly “command”/ try to direct him to do things I do want him to do. Lol! So it’s a bit of a mindset shift.
Anyone have any great experience with dog training or tips and tricks? I sometimes see dogs (usually like, a Golden Retriever) out on walks that seem so well trained and I’m always like, wow, that’s so cool! But I also haven’t really had a ton of free time and mental space to devote to it…. I know it’s an important part of responsible dog ownership though, so trying to prioritize it here where we can.
Ok, gotta run- have a good day!
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for some slightly cooler fall weather. It was sooo hot most of September, but now we’ve got highs in the 70s- and next week only highs in the 60s!
GRATEFUL KAE 
Hee hee hee why yes I have experience with dog training and I could have written everything that you wrote here word for word about our experience.
The good news is that ignoring what you don’t want and rewarding what you do want works…it just feels like it takes forever. Doggo went through an extreme jumping on people and counter surfing phase. I think I asked our trainer about these things one billion times and got the same answer one billion times and did the same thing one billion times…dog does unwanted behavior, toss treats to distract, ask dog to sit and do tricks so that she’s doing a “good” behavior that I can reward. Today she hardly ever jumps on us and is down to the occasional counter surf and things are much, much better. Just so you know of course things are not perfect – she’s still on a furniture chewing mission and she’s reactive around strangers and certain people. Hey it’s a journey and not a destination!
I know what you mean about wanting to blog but not having the time…I’m happy that you’re doing what you can!
Also, I loved the pumpkin house pic that you sent Jenny! Do they decorate the house for other seasons? If so I’d love to see more pictures!
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I think the thing is that you need to have treats on hand to reward behavior you want to see and this is where I usually fail because I can’t be bothered to have treats with me on every stupid walk. But this morning Hannah didn’t bark at some ladies walking with flashlights (it was dark) and I wanted to reward her excellent behavior, but I didn’t have anything, so all I could do was say “what a good girl!” and Hannah does not give a crap about me rewarding her with praise. I praise her for merely existing (you’re so pretty! your prance is delightful! I love walking with you!) and so if I were a better dog friend, I’d have delicious treats for her all the time. *sigh*
Also, it helps that Hannah had that back issue because it trained the jumping right out of her. So that’s a problem we never really tackled, but got solved through happenstance.
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My dog is a spazz and we’ve had some success with these methods. We had to work a lot on relaxing on a mat w/ treats without distractions, then gradually worked our way up to more distractions. The challenge we face now is that she’ll jump on someone, then run to her mat. Or leave her mat to jump, then run back. I guess it’s all too much for her, but it feels frustrating.
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Oh that does sound frustrating! I feel like we have made only baby steps with progress so far. I kind of feel like I’m still really trying to wrap my head around the whole clicker training thing. Sometimes I get confused, like, ok, when exactly am I supposed to click if I want him to do xyz? With the trainer we’ve done very specific, small actions. But in terms of later applying that to other behaviors on my own, it just seems a little confusing sometimes! I guess it’s just a process…. Charlie did do a bit better with not jumping on my parents when they came last week. (I told them to totally ignore him until he was down and calm.) It’s extra hard for us with Charlie because he has SUCH a sensitive stomach and can’t handle many high value reward treats. He ended up with a GI issue this past week and we had to back up to nothing besides kibble for almost a week which makes it really hard to do effective training, bc he kinda could care less about getting kibble as a “treat” for training and then is like, eh, pass. lol.
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I have no knowledge whatsoever about dogs or dog training, but I am happy to send you my eleven-year-old who would treat Charlie like her own son. One of our neighbors has a golden puppy and my kid is over there daily going over lessons with his owner and then teaching those lessons to him.
The whole thing sounds very difficult and stressful, but I know you will get there!
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I have no experience with dog training. It sounds hard, especially when Charlie is so cute. I would be much too lenient. But I know- it’s important to train him, so you’ll enjoy him more and people who come over will also enjoy him more. And then he’ll be happier overall. Good luck with it!
I DO have experience with not wanting to go out to evening sporting events. Like, every time there’s a high school football game (especially if it’s on a Thursday night) I spend the whole day not wanting to go. But then I go and end up having a GREAT time, so I just have to shut off that negative voice that tells me to stay home and read. I’m glad you went to that game and glad you enjoyed it so much!
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I am looking forward to following your dog training experience as my now 10-month old puppy is becoming harder to control. He’s 70 pounds, and every time I have to hold him back from running after a squirrel I fear for my life a bit! His favorite thing is to grab the leash halfway through our walks and wrestle me for it. So far I don’t think my method of just yelling expletives for all the neighborhood to hear is working so well. He was just neutered, so we are dealing with that lovely aftermath now, but I know we need a trainer involved soon!
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Ahhh I can only imagine if Charlie were a 70 lb dog! That would probably really stress me out!! Haha. The dog trainer said leash walking issues can be really difficult/complicated to train just because it’s a complex action with also SO many distractions all around them, overstimulation, excitement, etc. Like any behavior that the dog can do well at “home”, is amplified and completely different when out in the wild. lol. Hope the neutering went well… that was a WEEK for us trying to prevent him from jumping etc and sleeping was complicated since Charlie normally sleeps in our bed, but I didn’t want to risk having him jump up and down from our big king bed and I didn’t trust him to stay up there…. glad that is over with now!
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I’m also struggling to keep up with blogging and commenting lately too with all of my travel. There just isn’t much spare time during the day. This week was actually worse than a client-focused trip since we had stuff after work so there was no downtime. I got back to my hotel room at 10:15 on Tuesday and was in the office at 7 that day… I was so glad to fly home yesterday!
The volleyball game sounds so fun! I have never had a dog so am no help with training but I hope it is helpful!!
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I don’t have a dog, so I don’t have first-hand tips but I am friends with a dog trainer and he tells me the most important thing is being consistent in your messaging and keeping up with the training at home and not let it slip. The dog has to learn the cues and that’s hard if you give mixed messages. I think it’s fantastic you’re investing time in this because only trained dogs are well-behaved dogs and it will be so worth it.
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