Unfortunately Tor ended up in the cubicle next to us. He is a verrrrrry talkative young Alaskan Malamute, with amazing volume. In the past Gimme has paid very little attention to him, but we've never had him in the cubicle right next door. She really wasn't able to work on things that she didn't know well already - not with him "talking" right over the divider. He's a real sweet dog and his owner is a nice and very patient man, but he's one loud boy.
Thus we weren't able to work my plan. We did work on some of our well known behaviors and I also spent a lot of time letting Gimme clean out one of our peanut butter tubes.
After that we went to the cubicle over by the stairs and worked on her "push" behavior. That's a nose push, as opposed to a nose touch. Gimme is learning several concept behaviors - they are in essence verbs that she will generalize to do different things with many different objects (named-nouns). The verbs we working on are:
- touch - nose touch
- paw - paw touch or front paws on
- feet - back feet on
- push - push with your nose
- pick-up - pick up and hand to me
- bring - fetch it and bring to my hand
She's doing well with these and so is developing a nice vocabulary that will help us to build other behaviors. And despite our earlier setback to the plan (because of Mr. Noisy), we did make good headway on "push" tonight.
We also spent a little time working on loose leash walking on the stairs. That is a behavior that can be hard for dogs because it seems so natural to them to bound up the stairs. Gimme actually picked that up very quickly. Then again, she IS a genius.
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