I took all three of the nimrods out on a walk together last night because I wanted to get some group pictures in Washington Square Park and I didn't want to worry about a mob of 100+ tourists coming up behind us while I was trying to get all three of them to hold dropped-leash Stays.
Plus, while walking three dogs at once (at least these three dogs at once) isn't actually THAT hard, we do tend to monopolize the sidewalk as we go past, and it's a bit inconsiderate to do that during primetime in a city. So a night walk it was!
I made a halfhearted effort to get Florence to sit on the bench with the other two, but she wasn't comfortable with the jump and in general I don't encourage foster dogs to get on the furniture (their adopters don't always want them on the furniture and it's easier to give privileges than take them away, so, as ever, I enforce the most restrictive rule in my house and then the adopters can let up in their own houses if they want), so I didn't push the matter too hard.
I think she would have gotten on the bench if I'd coaxed her a little more, but the picture worked fine this way and she was willing to center herself nicely between the other two, so whatever.
Playing tourist at the freedom memorial. This one is actually more of a milestone for Pongu than the other two.
The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary Soldiers (as the freedom memorial is formally known) is flanked on either side by a long row of flags that flaps noisily in the wind. Pongu has been terrified of the flags and the tomb's flame since he was a little bitty babydog (of course, he was terrified of absolutely everything then, and he sorta still is, but I digress).
For him to be able to hold a Stay here, and not only that but a Down-Stay in a group, is a Big Deal. Scaredy dog is making progress!, and can do things now that would have been unimaginable a few years back.
And of course Florence is doing pretty well herself. Posing like a pro, and she hasn't even been here one week. She is a very good little dog for sure.
Last Sunday morning I woke up at 4 am to drive Pongu to a Rally trial at Kellar's Canine Academy, just outside NYC. The drive out there was actually a lot of fun: we did most of it at 80 mph up the Jersey Turnpike in near-total darkness, blasting a mismatched playlist that I threw together at the last minute and then accidentally put on shuffle because I'm an idiot who apparently cannot hit "Play" without screwing things up.
It was cool though, at least the playlist opened with the right song at the beginning ("In the Air Tonight," because I know you care).
Pongu did well overall. He NQ'ed one of the Level 3 runs on a jump runout (Recall Over Jump, which suggests to me that perhaps I should go ahead and enter a second CDSP trial so I can try to finish his Novice title this year, given that we're still having problems with that exercise and will probably need the extra attempts), but almost everything else was beautiful. He did the bonus retrieve exercise perfectly both times, marking the first time that Pongu has ever done a formal retrieve successfully outside the house and earning a final score of 208 (and first place) in his second Level 3 run. And he even did it with his dumbbell!
Most of our point deductions were on my end. I re-cued a Sit (costing 3 points) instead of taking the 1-point hit on the original crooked Sit; I set Pongu up stupidly a couple of times so that we had to re-do exercises (and take more 3-point hits) because otherwise he would have had signs directly in his path on recalls; I took a couple of hits on wide turns and lagging in heeling, which is my fault for not practicing enough.
But generally it was really good, particularly considering that was a venue we don't trial in often. Pongu's only been there once before, when he earned his ARCH and RL1X. So I was happy. He is getting so much better!
Final score tally (because, again, I know you care): 206, 207 (fifth place in Level 1), 203, 207 (second place in Level 2), NQ, 208 (first place in Level 3!).
Then I came home (return drive suuuucked, on-and-off traffic jams the whole way back) and made Florence wear the Homeless Dog Vest of Shame in an attempt to hock her to prospective adopters on the street.
It worked! Shining the Homeless Dog Bat Signal all across the land got her noticed by a really nice young couple out on the street. They asked about her and, later that evening, emailed saying that they were interested in adopting her.
HOORAY!!
As of this afternoon it's official: Florence has a wonderful home in Fishtown with a professor, which OF COURSE makes me irrationally proud because what is better than a professor. Nothing. That is the answer. Nothing. Ask any Asian mom. "Professor" is on par with "neurosurgeon": it just wins the game instantly. Even when we're talking about homeless dogs.
However, Florence is still going to be with us for another ten days while her actual people start getting their home ready for her. She won't be going home for real until next Friday.
The effort to civilize Florence proceeds at a better-than-decent rate. She is almost perfect on leash: she hardly ever pulls and is quite happy to trot blissfully next to her person, ready to be attentive at the first hint that you might reward her with a smile.
The only exception is that, predictably, as she gets more comfortable with the city, she's getting more interested in trying to greet other dogs, so now she whines and pulls toward them. However, Florence is small and easy to manage, and she is also very easy to recapture with a simple "hi!" or other verbal request for attention, so this is not a real problem. It might become a problem if it's not managed or if she's allowed to self-reward (or, at the other extreme, get too frustrated about not being able to self-reward) by greeting the other dog, but right now it's minor and easily prevented.
Housebreaking is going pretty well. No accidents in the house yet. Florence has a fairly elaborate circling-and-sniffing ritual before she goes potty, which makes it easy to tell (and prevent) when she's about to make a mess inside, but also makes it slightly more difficult to get her to potty outside, because if she hears or sees something while she's doing the ritual circling, she goes all "I CAN'T PEE WHILE PEOPLE ARE WATCHING ME" and refuses to go.
This isn't an issue when she poops (she also doesn't circle or sniff nearly as long before pooping), but it means she only goes pee about once a day right now, when she finally can't hold it anymore and is forced to pee in front of OMG PEOPLE.
If past experience holds true, she'll get over her reluctance when she stops being scared of passing cars and bus noises, but in the meantime it takes some patience to stand around for 10 or 20 minutes waiting for her to calm down enough to go pee.
On the training front, I didn't really get started working with her in any focused way until yesterday, because she only got here Saturday, and then on Sunday I had Pongu's Rally thing and on Monday and Tuesday I was scrambling to beat a book deadline (did it!), so until yesterday afternoon we were just doing the bare necessities: leash walking, housebreaking, not eating my house, etc.
Yesterday we got started on Sit. Here's where we are today, some four sessions later:
I taught it as a tuck Sit (i.e., the competition version) via clicker capturing for no particular reason beyond that she was offering that behavior all the time anyway, which made capturing very easy, and I wanted to try a different method of getting a tuck Sit.
Clicker capturing is SO MUCH EASIER than doing it with physical manipulation or foot targets, sweet holy jeebus. It is way WAY faster and easier than any other method. Alas, you have to realize from the get-go that you're going to want a competition Sit to get it that way, so those of us who trained it wrong the first time will have to continue to rely on the other methods to fix it.
Anyway, Florence now has a semi-functional Sit (I say "semi-functional" because (a) it's not fully proofed; and (b) I don't think she actually understands that Sit means Sit, i.e., if I said "Banana!" she would probably give me a Sit too, since at this point she's just thinking any verbal cue = Sit), so good enough, that's all the pet training I feel like doing with her.
I started her on nose touches too, and those are coming along nicely (she's a very clever little dog and quick to learn things, once she figured out she could learn things, and thereby cause cookies to rain from the sky), but I think I'm probably going to spend the next ten days trying to teach her the Shell game, just because.
I have no idea if we'll finish it. The Shell Game is fairly complicated and Florence has no foundations whatsoever. She was just introduced to clickers three days ago. And we only have about ten days to do anything before she goes home. But for exactly that reason, it's much more interesting to me to see how a totally green dog approaches that task than it is to teach her Down and Stay (besides which, she already has a beginner Stay just from me making her pose for so many pictures).
More pictures from this afternoon. I took Florence up to the deck because I
needed to tie down some blackberry vines anyway so she got to help me
garden.
Philly skyline pic, feat. my near-dead end-of-season cherry tomatoes:
The blackberry vines are pretty huge this year, so I had to climb over the deck and tie them on the other side of the wall too (they spill over the trellis and cover both sides). Every time I climbed the deck wall, Florence would be all WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING and she'd try to follow me over the wall.
When that didn't work, she'd follow me around the deck and stick her face through the gaps in the wall to look at me whenever she could.
Then I brought Crooky out to get some pictures of them together. It was so windy that neither of them really wanted to do much, although Florence did try to get Crookytail to play with her (so she does like other dogs! aha!).
Crooky's face in this one makes me laugh.
I have absolutely no idea what he's looking at here. His gaze is pointed at the hedge clippers I have resting on a shelf overhead but I can't figure out why Crooky would be interested in hedge clippers.
So much for Day One. Tomorrow I'll be out near NYC all day doing a Rally trial with Pongu, while the other two mutt monsters stay home. Hopefully the spousal unit can manage Florence without losing her or going completely insane.
At a little before 3 am last night, we drove out to a rest stop in New Jersey and picked up our latest foster dog: Florence, a three-year-old spayed female Australian Shepherd/??? mix from Robeson County, North Carolina.
I honestly have no idea what Florence's breed mix is -- friends have guessed everything from Beagle to Heeler to Spaniel in the mix, and any or all of those could be correct. What I do know is that she's slightly under 40 pounds, has an extremely soft, fluffy coat (it really is remarkably soft, even the outer coat), and is so far being a quiet, sweet, cuddly houseguest. She's only been here for about 12 hours and is still pretty stressed from the transition, but it's easy to see that this is a very nice dog, and she'd make a wonderful family pet or beginner dog for a novice owner.
There isn't too much of a backstory on Florence. She was picked up as a stray in a part of Robeson County that is known
to be a dumping ground for dogs (it's a "piney woods" area where a
lot of people drive out and abandon their dogs along with the rest of
the garbage that gets illegally dumped there). I always joke that our
pound dogs "came off the garbage pile" but Florence did in fact
literally come off the garbage pile.
Unlike most of our foster
dogs, Florence seems to have been allowed indoors at some point in her life.
She knows how doors work, she knows how stairs work, and the first thing
she did upon coming into the house was try counter-surfing, even though
there was no food on the counter at the time, so I am guessing
she knows how kitchens work (also now she knows that counter-surfing is Not Allowed). The noises of the city are new and frightening to her, though. She doesn't seem to have had any prior exposure to garbage trucks, SEPTA buses, or skateboarders, and South Street on a sunny Saturday afternoon can present some drastic culture shock to a country girl!
Florence has had puppies in the past, I would guess
more than once. And she LOVES cuddling; she will crawl into your lap and
butt her head under your hand to make you pet her, and then go into hilarious contortions so that she can press every possible inch of herself against you somewhere. Whoever adopts this dog had better want a seriously smooshy lapdog.
But she has had no
formal training as far as I can determine -- doesn't seem to know any commands, wasn't familiar with
how to walk on leash, etc. She is, however, picking these things up very quickly. Just between last night and this afternoon, her leash manners have improved to the point where she fits in with all the other average dogs in our neighborhood. On an EasyWalk harness, she's a breeze.
Florence doesn't seem to know "Sit" on cue, but she offers the behavior readily when she wants to earn a treat, so I was able to pose her for pictures much faster than I'm usually able to get foster dogs posed. We can work on adding the actual verbal cue later. I don't know how much training I'll have time to do with her, but I think Sit is the only standard cue I'll bother with this time. I'm a little bored with my usual training progression so if I teach her anything it'll probably be nose touches or foot targeting or, I dunno, something different from what I usually do.
But Sit is pretty crucial to a pet dog's life, so Sit stays on the syllabus.
Florence's long, plush fur makes her legs look even shorter than they are, but she is built long and relatively low. Not nearly as much as Foozie or Serenity, but she's definitely more of a "rectangular" dog than a "square" one.
So far she has not shown a ton of interest in other dogs, either Dog Mob or random passing dogs on the street. Florence is clearly well socialized around other dogs and adept in navigating their communicative cues, she's just not very interested in them. This will probably change as she gets more relaxed (it usually does, particularly since Crookytail can be remarkably persistent in coaxing the fosters to play with him), but so far she is much more people-oriented and will basically ignore other dogs in favor of paying attention to a person.
And that's where we are on the first day. Florence is cuddly, cute, healthy, and isn't presenting any observable behavioral issues at this time, so I imagine she should get adopted pretty quickly.
We're back in Philly as of last night, so here's the second half of the Nantucket picture dump.
Quidnet Beach: This beach is pretty popular with families during the summer, as its waves tend to be gentler than those on Tom Nevers, and it's not the most appropriate place to bring dogs in the high season. However, by October, the water was too cold for swimming and we had the beach almost entirely to ourselves.
Dog Mob met a lot of wildlife on this excursion. Mostly it was dead wildlife, like Mr. Dead Horsehoe Crab here:
...but some of it was very much still alive. We saw several seals quite close to the shore. I'm not sure how many there were, because they'd go under and resurface somewhere else, so it would be easy to double-count the same seal making multiple appearances. But there were at least three distinct ones that were visible at the same time.
This particular seal chomped one of the seagulls floating near it. Gobbled the bird down while its wings were still flapping on either side of the seal's head. Crookytail looked on in consternation after it happened.
We also visited Sesachacha Pond on the same trip. Sesachacha is the biggest pond on the island and is separated from the sea by only a few dozen yards of sand. In the background of this shot is yet another bit of deceased wildlife: that white puff behind and to the right of Crookytail's head is a large dead seabird.
The next couple of days we went back to the Middle Moors, exploring new corners of forest and moorland that we hadn't seen in all our other hours of crisscrossing those trails. Dog Mob never got tired of it; there was always a new deer skeleton to discover, or a new decomposing water bird, or a new bit of fox poop. Endless amazing surprises!
They chased deer and chased bunnies and chased birds. Crookytail picked up an impressive collection of new scrapes, cuts, and scabs every time he went out (he seems to have particularly tender footpads, or else is unusually hard on them, because he wears holes in the leathers of his feet EVERY TIME), and never seemed bothered by any of it.
Pongu, who is much more cautious about bulldozing through prickle bushes, never got a scratch.
I made repeated attempts to reach an enormous sinkhole that we could see on satellite view of the Middle Moors, but every time I was stymied by the impossibly thick bushes that surround the giant hole on every side. This is as close as we ever got (the hole is -- I think -- that faintly visible depression about an inch straight above Pongu's head with a reddish bush on its left side).
I wanted to see the island in the fall -- everyone says the Middle Moors are particularly beautiful when the foliage starts changing, and indeed, it is so. Would that I had a better camera (and the skill to use it) so that I could more adequately capture the color shifts between pink grass, red blueberry bushes, yellow-leaved grapevines, wildflowers in every hue, and sturdy greenery.
Recently I started a new training class -- the same one that I talked about in a previous post
-- and while I'm still of mixed emotions here (so far it's not that
bad, although I will admit to feeling a pang of alarm when the
instructor said that we'd only be using clickers for about a month
because she didn't see any value to them after that... oof), I'm trying
to do the exercises with an open mind, at least for as long as I can.
We
are, as I'd expected, spending a lot of time pushing and prodding dogs
into place. So far Pongu is tolerating it pretty well; he's clearly
puzzled by the whole endeavor, but he trusts me and is doing his level
best to cooperate with what he understands the exercises to be.
Currently we're working on position changes: Sit, Stand, Down. The emphasis is on moving the dog (not
allowing the dog to move itself) in such a way that all the position
changes leave the dog perfectly in Heel position. Tuck Sit, fold-back
Down, kick-back Stand.
This
is important because, as demonstrated in this clip I made a really long
time ago with Crookytail, the other versions of these movements will
pull a dog out of Heel position very quickly. This is a Bad Thing in
competition obedience, at least if you care about getting high scores.
There
are a number of ways to teach these movements to achieve the same goal,
though. With Pongu, I originally taught them using a platform and foot
target:
Doing
it this way can be slower up front. You have to teach the dog to
balance on the platform and keep his front feet on the target. Then you
have to teach him to move through the desired position changes while
maintaining his footing on the platform and target.
If
you do it with the push-and-pull method, there's no delay to get those
extra foundations in place; the Sit-Stand-Down sequence is the foundation.
So
at the outset it might look like doing it the "hands off" way with the
platforms and foot targets is the roundabout inefficient way of doing
things. Assuming that you're being careful about not actually hurting or
worrying your dog with the physical manipulation method, why not use the faster technique?
Three reasons spring to mind:
First,
while the platforms are slower up front, I am inclined to think that
they save time in the long run, because you can use those same
foundations for pivot work and balance/core conditioning exercises and
tons upon tons of tricks. Some of those extras will help you in
the competition obedience ring and some might not, but we don't (I hope)
just have dogs so we can teach them only the
Novice-through-Utility exercises and then nothing else ever for the rest
of their lives. A dog who has learned to think creatively, and not just
let himself be passively guided into positions, is much more fun for me
to train over the long haul.
Second, because I think the dog internalizes and retains these lessons better
when it's making its own decisions and coming to its own understanding
of what is wanted. It's the same argument that applies to free-shaped
behaviors vs. lured ones: yes, it might take a little longer to install
early on, but the dog really understands what is wanted, and so
retention is much stronger (not a small consideration when you're
planning to ask for these behaviors amid the stress of a trial
environment). I don't actually know whether this one is true, but I'll be watching to see whether my guess is right.
And
third, because as I observed during that first introductory class, a
lot of people aren't that careful about respecting their dogs' comfort
levels. They may want to be, but in the hurry of a crowded,
fast-paced class, a lot of novice handlers with novice dogs get
flustered and frustrated (I know I did, before I learned to accept that
sometimes we're just going to be behind the rest of the class and that's okay).
Unable to guide their dogs gently into position, and seeing everyone
else doing "better," they resort to ever-greater measures of force to
bend their dogs into compliance.
It makes me
uncomfortable to watch somebody handling a four-month-old puppy like an
Ikea table that isn't coming together right. I know I get mad enough to
just bang things either together or into pieces, and by the time I reach
that level of frustration, I don't even care which it is anymore (one
of several reasons why assemble-it-yourself furniture is a no-go in this
household). But I'm not doing that with a puppy. Not when the failure
is my fault, not his. Not over a silly game that we're supposed to be
playing together for fun.
Ultimately, it should be
possible for someone to get the same behavior by either method. I think
that the methods used in this class are probably easier for a novice in
some ways. But at the same time, I think they are harder on (not
necessarily for, but on) the dogs, and that's not a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
All roads may lead to Rome, but some charge tolls that I'm not paying.
