Our First CGC Class

Gimme had her first CGC class last night... but let me catch you up on the rest of our day first.

In the morning, I did a session on sit, down and touch to establish our baseline.  It wasn't as bad as the night before... but still not as good as I expected it to be after a night of rest.  She was doing better toward the end of the 3 minute session, so that's good.  We'll need to continue working on that.

From there we went to work.  I was going to work Gimme in the parking lot, but then decided I wouldn't since we had class that night, that it might be better to leave her a bit fresher mentally. 

After working we went to the fort to walk.  It was cool, so during our walk I did some simple recalls and asked for sits and downs.  In doing this I noticed an interesting thing.  For sit, Gimme responds best to the verbal; for down she responds best to the hand signal.  She was pretty good on the recalls, but not that responsive on the sits and downs.  Clearly we have room for improvement.

Class was okay.  Its certainly not my style of training, but the instructor and I have an understanding that I'm just there to train in the environment.  It was a lot to take in for Miss Gimme, since it was an open floor plan with eleven other dogs.  We spent the first half of class with her in her crate just getting peanut butter in her Kong ball.  I covered two sides of her crate to give her a bit of visual break until she was ready for the room.  As she'd polish her ball clean, she would roll it out by my foot for a refill.  Each time I'd give her an attitude check and then refill it.  She ate a LOT of peanut butter. 

When she was ready, I brought her out and we worked on the same exercises the class was working on - attention, sit and down.  Of course, she knows all that and was doing very nicely.  From time to time she would look around at the other dogs, so I'd say "whazzat" ("look at that" from Control Unleashed), then she would look back at me and get treated.  That is very helpful for her. 

I find it interesting that for most dogs when they are concerned about something, they can't turn their eyes away from it.  Gimme has learned along the way that she feels better if she doesn't stare at stuff that worries her.  She looks, but then then is quickly satisfied and turns her back on it.  I see that as the beginning of her learning to calm herself.  Woo hooooo.

Also during class I discovered that Gimme may not care for the beef I'd cooked and cut up for treats.  She eats them okay, but isn't inclined to work as hard for them as she will to nibble a bit off a big hunk of boiled garlic chicken.  That may explain why she wasn't as responsive during our walk on the fort.  I think she really misses the hot dogs and deli meats.  We have no choice since I discovered it was the sodium nitrite in them that was causing her to have itchy ears.  If you look up side affects for sodium nitrite, one of them is pink and itchy skin.  There is much evidence that food sensitivities often show up in ear irritation or infection.  Put those two things together and its no more processed meats for Gimme.  [Of course, I came to this discovery just days after laying in a sizable stock of those things from a meat sale.]

Class was shortened last night, which worked well so that Gimme didn't have a prolonged exposure.  Afterward she made it clear she didn't want to get in the car.  She did have to while I went back in to gather our stuff.  Afterward we went for a nice walk on the Percival Landing boardwalk.  Gimme had never been there and was fascinated by all the different surfaces and textures to walk on as well as smells galore. 

There aren't nearly as many people walking on the boardwalk as there are around Capitol Lake, so we may go there again.  We met some people, almost all of whom had to pet the Prettiest Puppy on the Planet.  Anyone who likes dogs is just naturally attracted to her.  One young girl was a little afraid of her...  so I put Gimme on a sit stay and then stood next to the girl and helped her tell Gimme what to do using hand signals. 

I was very pleased that Gimme still had so much desire to work left in her after class.  I expected her to feel wiped out.  This tells me that she is making good progress on the things you don't see as well as the things you do.