Marley Goes to School

Yesterday Marley started six weeks of school.  He's been placed in an adult class despite being only 6 months old.  Because there is one trainer at the Ponderay Petco store, she's gotten to know him a bit at the 3 sessions of Puppy Play we've gone to, and she told us this class would be the best match.  She tries to match dogs by energy level, even more than size or age at the Puppy Play.  His classmates are about a year old.  One is a border collie, but we're not sure what the third dog is.  She's not real happy with other dogs getting really close to her. 

Day one we worked in separate spaces.  Rebecca set up spaces by arranging the benches to provide both seating and separation.  This allows room to work, and keeps the dogs from getting in each others space, reducing confrontations.

We worked on name recognition (when you say your dog's name he/she must look at you to be rewarded).  This is a basic skill to be built upon.  Nearly all training says you should say your dog's name before giving them a command.  By rewarding looking at you, they learn that if you say their name something good is going to follow.  I had started working on this (but with "watch me") just a couple days before.  He's pretty good at responding to his name.  We work on it a bit throughout the day at home.

We worked on sit.  We're sort of backtracking here, since she wants us to use "stinky" (lots of smell) treats to lead him back into a sit.  We're doing it her way because of it being a building block of other training later on.  Marley's been a good sitter since he came home with us.  He just needed a name for it.

We worked on "target" - we call it "touch" and have been working on it for quite some time, so we worked on moving the target (palm of hand) to various places to give him a bit of challenge since he already knew it.

And, last but very much not least, we worked a bit on come.  That is one we really need lots of work on.  In a training situation he was doing well, up to a point, out in the yard before the mushrooms shut us down.  So, this is where we'll concentrate most of our effort.  This is a basic, vital, and sometimes life-and-death skill.

Speaking of "stinky" treats, we're about to find out how hot dogs affect Marley.  If they make him fart stinky farts we'll look for something else (like cook up some meat & cut into tiny pieces for training treats).  The important thing is that the treats are so good that they will convince him that doing what we want is better than chasing the cat, driving off the deer, following a scent ...

Update:
We attended a one-hour leash manners class a couple hours before the Sunday Puppy Play session.  We're learning how to let him learn how to keep the leash loose.  We practiced in the training area, then spent time walking around the store so the pups could learn to keep their attention on us and their leashes loose.  It was up to them to learn, not up to us to actively teach.  That means we stopped if they reached the end of the leash & pulled, we rewarded when they stayed close and when they made eye contact.  By the end of it Marley was almost heeling, and the goal was just to "walk nice" and not pull on the leash.  He's a good student.