Who’s afraid of the dark?
- Apr 23, 2025
- 3 min read
This day started out with a really nice session with food.
First, we played with some luring moves and interacted with the “Where Am I” game and Find is really getting much better in locating her position in front of me. She is still not always standing up and has the tendency to sit down but at this time, the position of right in front of me is more important to me so I just try to be fast enough to reward also the standing at the same time.
We then started to play with “Zen”, without any words of course.
This game will help her with self control but also, it will build a future skill for any action that she would need to do with a forward focus (jumps, face out positions and walk, parallel positions and so many other things too).
It’s not an easy game at first, especially for puppies, and that’s why I am only building the first criteria at this time which is - waiting while the treat is gaining distance until it comes back. It has to be a quick movement so she really doesn’t have the time to move and I am also using the high platform to make the standing boundaries a bit more clear and easy for her.
Until that point the session was super good but I had too much fun and didn’t noticed that maybe I am making it too long (for sure, actually) because when I moved to the next exercise she told me very clearly she needed a break.
I tried the around a bar work, not by demand or command, just rewarding on the ground for a circular movement or a beginning of one, and even though it’s a really easy one, it was too much for her and she refused the exercises so I had to release her and wait for her to show me that she is into it again. After that, it was great but I learned my lesson for sure!
For the afternoon, we played with the toy and kept working our retrieval because it seems something there is not clear yet.
I really am trying to take out all my big guns and see what it the reason why she feels still not confident enough or not trusting enough to retrieve it all the way to me.
On the one hand, she loves tugging with me, but still not more than how much she loves to keep the toy to her self so I am trying to see if it’s something about my playing that I can improve, or if it’s related to the toy type or maybe my motion in space, anyways, I still need to find out what I am missing in that aspect, but I am not worried, we will get there ☺️
I had quite a busy day and when evening came my friend who Seraphina loves was supposed to come so I took her out for a session and wanted to see her reaction if he surprised us in the middle of training. HUGE mistake from my side, I don’t even know what I was thinking to myself!!!
During the session she was good but when he surprised us she got so surprised that I was shocked by her reaction. Lucky enough, he was trained well enough to not move or make any further discomfort so she could calm rather fast and when she realised it was him, she got so excited and we could go back to training.
Not the best ending for the day, but at least I learned something 😂