Making friends
- Apr 27, 2025
- 2 min read
This day started off with a great session where I naturally figured out something that I could only notice when I watched back the videos.
I started from playing with the toy (no surprise there 😂) still working the fun and retrieval which is slowly getting better.
But the interesting part was when I changed to food!
I always love rewarding the dog with many releases but with Seraphina, I naturally started to reward the smallest things with the ping pong game.
I figured out that for her going into a trick from a static position is raising positive stress level in a way I don’t want yet since I feel she may be still too young for it. So instead of only releasing her I also started inserting some basic tricks we’re working on in the middle of ping pong 😅
It worked really well and I could feel it’s better for her so now it will probably go into our training routine from time to time when I feel it’s needed!
After some luring and tricks and ping pong we changed to platform work where we trained the front paws, 4 legs on higher platform for zen preparation and a flat platform for laying down and resting.
During the higher platform workout I noticed that she is about to get distracted by my friend who came in so I made sure to release her before she will do it herself so she can go and say Hi and her recall was perfect so I was extra happy about it!
Later in the day my mom came to visit and it was the first time she met Seraphina and if meeting a new person wasn’t enough, she also got to meet her giant dog and make a new friend!
At first she was a bit intimidated by her size but it didn’t take long before she was back to her happy crazy self ☺️
Before I left the house that afternoon I wanted to start a new skill training with Seraphina.
Delayed rewarding.
In the exercise which was a bit difficult for her at first I teach her a super important skill which is to concentrate in me despite the food that’s waiting for her in the bowl.
We did different levels of the exercise and she did absolutely great, however, it’s clear to me that we still need more time before we should try this again.
That night I came back home and had zero energy to do something more so I just let her out quickly and went to sleep.
I guess I felt that anyway she did already so much during the day and it’s ok to give my self a much needed break before I’ll fly out for a week of seminars the next day ☺️