Normally this is the day I simply refuse to do any training. However, I was forced to make an exception. Seems there were far too many days last week where I didn't do enough training to meet Sanity's idea of a good day. I knew I was bound to have to pay for the lack of work, but...
So by late afternoon I had chased Sanity out of the kitchen where she was doing some very determined counter surfing on a counter that didn't even have anything of interest on it. This was followed by her getting caught repeatedly jumping on and off the sofa in the living room. A bit later she grabbed the tissue box and took off with it, only to drop it and slip behind my chair so she could grab a box of cold pills to be followed in quick succession with my nose spray.
My solution? I put feeling sorry for myself aside and found leash, remote, dumbbell and small stool. Yep, my solution was to work her on the retrieve, the place command on a very small, difficult place and some serious full attention sits. Work we did, for the better part of a full hour we moved between just getting on and off that stool, arm's length retrieves and full attention sits with direction changes. And then the itch had been scratched and she was willing to stay out of trouble.
I started out with Chows. It took 5 Chows to do what one good Doberman can do. I would much rather deal with one than 5. Well, actually that isn't true since I normally have anywhere from 2 or 3 to up to 18, 20 or more dogs here on any given day. There are many times when I train up to 3 dogs per day. Of course, that is way down from the days when I used to be able to train 5 to 8 dogs a day and still have enough energy to teach 3 classes and maybe a private student or two.
ReplyDeleteGetting old really sucks.