Dog School

Dog School went well this week. Recall 2 weeks ago we had our first class, and it was all exercises that Boo knew practically before we even got her. And there was this doggy massage business.

Well, this week was substantially better. Boo will never be a calm motionless dog, however she was willing to lie down on her mat and let us rub her. For short periods of time. Then she would get up and look around until we told her to lie back down again. Feeding her hot dog seemed to help a lot. :-)

They've started introducing more distractions also, and so far she's been handling it well. The idea is that we'll have her do something, and then a strange person will walk by, and we click and treat when she reorients to us. In theory the level of distraction will increase until it's a dog running up to her. And in theory, she will then also simply reorient to us. Haha. We'll see. This may take a while.

But the best part of the class was the "off leash" part. They have us walk our dog to an enclosure made of plastic gates that the dog can see through. Again, you click and treat every time the dog reorients to you, but they're actually off leash, so the stakes are a bit higher.

Poor Miss Boo.

You may recall that we had agility class a few months back. Well, agility was in the same room. The focus on that agility class was on jumping, and getting the dogs to offer jumping for a reward the same way they might offer a sit or a down to us for a treat.

So, Miss Boo thought that we wanted her to jump out of the box. I know this because she jumped out 2-3 times, and each time she would reorient back to me to receive her treat.

Suffice to say, this was not the goal of the exercise, and it kind of freaked the instructors out.

And to be honest, I felt a little bad for the Boo who got hung up on her leash and came crashing down in the middle once because she didn't have enough slack. She was trying so hard!

I have to say though, I was really impressed with a) her athleticism, and b) her ability to generalize jumping to a variety of scenarios. The gates looked nothing like jumps, yet she inferred that's what we wanted anyway. Also, she took these 30" jumps from a complete standstill. I'm telling you, my dog is ripped.

I can't say that I'm terribly surprised though. We'd already noticed that she's generalized jumping to other contexts at home. For instance, she now jumps on our bed with ease, and also has been know to sail over the arm of the couch to reach her coveted spot in the cuddler. He favorite place to sit while I study is the back of my chair, which she leaps onto from halfway across the room.

We told the instructors to tell Alexa (our agility teacher) that Miss Boo had taken her agility class to heart and was now an expert jumper.

Anyway, we'll see how well she does next week.