Boxing day

In honor of boxing day I think I'll play some 101 things to do with a box with the pupkins. Tom is fine getting kibble for that. Opal doesn't get excited about kibble. Their food tastes are quite odd. Most of the time Tom will work for kibble or hard biscuits, sometimes not. But Opal is the one who counter serves and acts like she wants all the food yet she's picky. Mama gave the dogs the rest of the chicken ginger soup that hadn't been eaten and Opal tried to do her best to only eat the chicken not the ginger or the broth, so Mama picked out the ginger and then strained the broth from Opie's portion. Tom lapped up the broth no problem. Tom is also much more thorough. If you spill milk on the floor he's the one who'll lick up all of it and not leave some. Or if there's a turkey pan to be licked out he's your man. One of Tom's good qualities. :)

Limp training is coming along. We're at a one step hop with Tom. He can limp several with putting his paw in my hand. Hasn't quite got the mechanics for easy limping on his own.

I got video of Opal blowing bubbles and couldn't download it to the computer for the life of me. It was very annoying.

I worked with Buckley on Christmas Eve. We'd gotten quite far on his rollover and I was able to really fade the lure. I used treats as a reward at first and then tried a tug toy to not fill him up. At first he didn't get the tug, drop it, trick, tug, routine but then he figured it out. Also started weave through the legs and easy button. He liked hearing the noise. That's what happened with Tom too except it took Tom a while to get that he could make the noise. But the easy button was hard to put on stimulus control with Tom because it was too self-rewarding, I think.

We went back to the Benard's house in the evening and I asked for a rollover in the kitchen Buckley seemed to have forgotten all the lure fading we'd done. Difficulty generalizing? Or the first session he knew it because we were repeating the behavior a lot? I'm not sure and didn't pursue it by taking him in the living room to try. I did play some 101 things to do with a box and he was good at it. Have to be careful not to reward box chewing.

My grandmother got me Victoria Schade's Bonding with Your Dog book. I'm looking forward to reading that.

I'm taking a course at Harvard Extension called The Cognitive Dog: Savant or Slacker about dog cognition. I'm really looking forward to it. So far I have two of the course books. Raymond Coppinger's dog evolution book (I highly recommend it) and a collection of canine studies by Peter Jensen the Behavioural Biology of Dogs. First chapter has a lot of brain anatomy that is a bit hard to understand.