Her main job is to keep me cheered up. If I appear to be settling in on the couch for a good long mope - Gimme feels compelled to interrupt such inclinations. For the first week, she patiently snuggled with me, but now she believes its time to raise the bar. Within minutes, she'll leap into my lap, roll on her back, wiggle and bite at my hands or do other things to get me to play with her. If that isn't effective, she repeats the process with a toy in her mouth.
We've been meeting Mary and boyfriend, Grafton, for lots of walks. Both kids have felt more cooped up than usual. Mary isn't able to do our regular distance yet (following her surgery), so we've been trying to get in more frequent walks - lest the two kids go bonkers. We've tried unsuccessfully for months to get this footage.
Here's another video of the two of them playing... you cannot miss seeing why Mary and I enjoy watching them so much. For some reason they always do their best running and playing on that side of the road, so the camera is facing into the sun.
Nosework for the last couple of weeks has been good. Last week we met at the medical center and did a bunch of hides outside. The hides were in the lee side of the building, so the air current was unusual. All the dogs went direct to the first hide, then right past two and three to the four and five, catching two and three on the way back. Sometimes the air moves in a way that they don't catch the scent until they come at it from the other direction Since I decided to only reward Gimme's efficient searches with the really primo rewards, she hasn't had a clear instance of not going direct to the odor. Naturally I don't want to mistakenly give her the average treats if she validly didn't know where it was, so I'm careful to assume in her favor. Gimme did a good job of finding them all and a couple of the later ones were amazingly direct and fast.
This week in class we met at the building and worked container hides. Joyce had purchased an iPad and had the ability to tape our runs. So we only did one hide per run, three runs. We got to see each one. Gimme did well, but was tending to revert to box trashing a little bit. The air current was really still and the dogs showed us that it did strange things to the scent. They all would walk right by a box, inches to one side and not catch the odor, and yet from a couple of feet away on the other side, they'd home right in on it. I was really glad that Gimme was later in the line-up, so I could see what the others were doing and know when it was her turn that she wasn't being inefficient.
She did make it pretty clear on the way home that three searches of one hide each was not sufficient for her. So we did some other training when I got home.
Joyce has promised to try and send the clips to me - when they come, I'll post them.
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