Adventures with Samantha

Okay I FINALLY have our Reyna and Sam video uploaded. We worked on Relax a lot. I looked back at our old video from last march and its amazing our far we have come even though we haven't been working on it very much.

Sam is Reyna's best friend, she goes out of her mind whenever she sees her, so to have both dogs off leash in the house would be pretty much impossible I thought. My plan for the weekend was just to go back to my old protocol of on leash or in a crate for both dogs.

Once Sam got here though I decided I owed it to both of them to do some training. They rough housed like crazy and started slamming into furniture...what I had we gotten ourselves into???

But instead of crating them I decided to work on thir default behaviors. At the time they had never done anything together that involved much self control at all. So I got out their dinner, each dog with her own bowl and sat on the couch. Sam has a Level 1 foundation so her zen pretty darn good. It took her a few minutes to realize that I was paying for downs, but once she worked it out the two did awesome! And Reyna got to work on her Level 3 relax which is to relax in sight of other dogs playing...might as well start with another dog not playing to break down the behavior! 

By the end of the weekend, both dogs had developed a default calm for indoors and we only crated them at night! 

Which brings me to the next fun thing we needed to work on, Reyna totally losing control whenever I let them out of their crates. It didn't matter what order I let them out, it became a scream fest each time. So again, it was time to implement a protocol. Reyna was doing much better by the end of the weekend, but really could have used Sam there for another week or so to get herself really under control.

Forgive the angle of this video and just keep your eyes on the dogs haha!

 

Some other things that Sam learned were, to not go into the playroom no matter how tasty the toddler looks, that "mealtime" means no dogs allowed in the dining room until somebody says "floor patrol!" at which point it's a free for all and Penelope's chair is usually the best place to start.

Reyna got to work on self control around another dog and progressed very quickly. Much better than I would have thought. At the start of the weekend we couldn't pet Same without Reyna coming in to push her out of the way. So we working on of few of theses games:

Sam gets pets, Reyna gets chicken
Both dogs stay, then both dogs come to front and get chicken
Both dogs stay and only Sam comes - Reyna gets chicken for holding her stay
Reyna Stay while mommy bounces around and makes crazy noises with Sam - Reyna gets chicken
Reyna plays tug with mommy while Sam tries her best to distract her - Reyna gets chicken

As you can guess after just a day Reyna decided there was an awful lot of value for her in letting Sam get some attention. The joint recall was actually probably hardest because they are both moving together but must remain focused on me and not each other. Very difficult for two playmates. But they did wonderfully. Such good girls!!!!