Tip Tail

Tatum Snuggled In

Well, I am learning, yet again, all about dog training all over again! At least it sure seems like it. I didn’t really know how to train Lucy, I will admit. Lucy was a sweet young girl, when she was young. However, she was, first and foremost, a girl. And unlike my sweet goofy dorky boys, Lucy had spunk and sass and I was at a loss.

And now I have another girl I’m learning how to train. Tatum may have started out as a shy and fearful rescue collie girl. But now, she is smart and sassy and no longer afraid. Sometimes she will revert back to acting like she is afraid. And perhaps she is somewhat afraid when I need to get her and she skitters off. And Skitter is the best word I can find for it. She goes into a trot and her tail goes down and she won’t come to any human. Chasing after her is not something I want to do, though then I wouldn’t have to get any Anoretix to help me to lose weight.

Tatum is a bossy girl!

I’m 95% sure that is from her living in a hoarders yard and the only way people could catch her was to chase her into a corner.  But now she is not hurt. I have worked very hard over the last year to build up her confidence and give her a great sense of herself.  Well, I may have swung the pendulum a bit too far! LOL… though I don’t know if that’s possible, because I love having confident dogs.  I want my dogs to be confident and sure of themselves and know they are going to be treated well. I want them to trust me, too.

I have been working a little bit with Tatum around agility equipment. And I’m finding that sassy girl come out.  I want to be firm with her. She needs to be able to handle firm humans, not just ones that are molly-coddling her with treats. Because in the agility ring, and the obedience ring, stuff happens. She really has to come with me. With or without treats. Of course I encourage her with treats, but I’m fading the lure. I have lured her for a year and now it’s time to fade those so she knows she can come with me without them. However, she has a lot of spunk now and she’s asserting herself. Which I love! And I have no idea how to deal with! LOL. So with the help of my trainer I am learning.

I was a bit afraid that Tatum would shut down on me and stop working all together. Last Friday we were out on the agility equipment, and she didn’t shut down. Anyway.. here is the story.

In the agility yard Tatum seems to want to go off and do her own thing, unless I have a treat in her nose. And in a trial, no treat will be in her nose. And so we are working on fading out the treats. We have two jumps set up, and she is on a sit before the first jump. Next, she has to do a paw touch to my hand, then she gets a click and treat, and then she goes over the jump to a treat on a target. Next she goes over the next jump, me calling the jump, and then she comes to me and sits before she gets another treat.

She looks so sweet asleep.

The reason I am doing this is because Tatum will tend to disconnect from me and go skittering off. Or she’ll just go hopping off for fun if she sees something more interesting. And yes, even though I use super good treats, she still can get distracted and disconnect. And I really need to work on her staying connected to me while we work.  And really she needs to connect to me, not just to the treats.

Tatum is very smart and she’s a good girl.  And I woud never have figured this stuff out on my own. I’m so thankful for my trainer.  I didn’t know how to train Lucy, and that’s why we never got very far in obedience or agility. Now i have more resources and with Tatum I am determined to go much further!

After we did the jump work with her, we thought we’d see how she did on the tunnel.  Well.. this bratty little girl goes cruising into the tunnel as happy as a clam, and doesn’t come out the other end! LOL she peeked out and looked at us like she was going ‘na na na naaaa…’ I laughed so hard I almost fell over. I know, I shouldn’t laugh ’cause it’s a reward, but I couldn’t help myself.  She is such a brat!  So we gave up on the tunnel and we went to the teeter.

She did great on the teeter. Strangely enough, she has no fear of contacts. We’ve done them before and she just goes right over and down, A-Frame and all. She doesn’t quite tip the teeter on her own, and she’s too square and fragile to slam it down (I’d be afraid it hurt her), so my trainer told me to leash her up to do the teeter. That way we can stay connected again. At the beginning, she sat and did the paw touch, then went over the teeter in a controlled manner, then at the bottom she got another treat and a release.

And since it’s difficult, a lot of the time, to keep the dog connected and engaged between the obstacles (it’s the silence between the notes that make the music) i kept her engaged with me as we walked back around the teeter and we did the same thing again.

Don’t think this training stuff is my idea… LOL I cannot take credit! My trainer is amazing and has great ideas. I wish I could have such ideas.   And hopefully with this great foundation work Tatum will come along in her training nicely. And I’m going to start doing the paw touch and the treat in flyball too. Because her speed and her running isn’t the issue at this point. It’s the connection she has with me. And since she never really bonded with a human when she was a puppy, we have to let her know it’s a good thing to bond, and stay connected, to me.

And I know she is bonded to me, when she rubs her head in my hip on the couch at night and I scritch her neck and her ears. I’m still not completely sure what kind of relationship we have, because of her past, and she’s different that my other dogs, both rescued and not.  So I am learning. And I love learning how to teach her and work with her and communicate with her.  It’s an amazing process!

Sorry this is such a long post.. but I want to record our progress so I can look back in a year and see how far we have come!  I have such a rotten memory! LOL

Extracted Tooth

Well, Chase went into the vet on Thursday for a routine teeth cleaning. I didn’t really think he needed it… but my husband said Chase has been scratching his mouth a lot lately. When Lucy scratched at her mouth a while ago, her tooth ended up being cracked and she had it pulled.
Our vet’s teeth cleanings are usually a month out, but they had a cancellation and so we were lucky to get Chase in sooner.

Chase Frog Dog

Well, when he was under, the vet found a cracked tooth in the upper left of his mouth. It was a molar. And the vet said it was so cracked she could see pulp. Ooo yuck! But more than yuck, poor Chase was probably in a lot of pain. That darn boy, he doesn’t let us know when he’s in pain!

I’m not sure if you can see it well in the picture above… my husband held his mouth open while I snapped only one picture. Chase didn’t like having his mouth opened for a picture but he’s actually a good boy and held fairly still.  When I looked into his mouth yesterday, there was a fairly good sized gap with a couple of stitches in the middle. It looked like it was still painful. We gave him a little Rymadil and it seemed to help him. And he was playing with Muffit and Tatum this afternoon, something he actually hasn’t done for a while.

So now he’s on the road to recovery. He’s not going to go to agility practice on Saturday, or flyball practice on Sunday… which, I’m sure, he’ll be displeased about. But I think his mouth needs to heal up and his body needs to conserve energy.  And I don’t want him tugging much with those stitches in his mouth. So he gets a break. Maybe next time we’d consider getting the tooth capped, or crowned… but I’m not sure how that works. Maybe it would be better for the dog, when the tooth is a molar. Actually, I didn’t even know that was an option until just recently!

So anyway, I can work with him doing some watch work this weekend, that’ll be good for both of us. Chase is such a good boy. I feel really bad that he was in such pain and we didn’t know!  After Lucy’s bladder infection, and now this… it wasn’t a very good week for dog health! Hopefully they will heal up soon and be fat and happy in a few days. As for me, time to sit down with some good Amazon books and have a nice relaxing evening. And tomorrow I’ll stay home too, watch some TV, and drink tea.

I was just sitting around and looking at old pictures from five years ago and wondering where life was then. And where my life and dogs will be in another five years.

Five years ago was 2003… and we were fostering a couple small dogs, a silky terrier mix named Jojo and a Shitzu named Sammy.  We only had Lucy, Levi and Angel at that time. This picture is of Levi and Angel at an agility trial my husband came to and brought Angel with.

Levi was only four and we’d only had Angel for a year. Lucy was only five and she was healthy and strong, didn’t have the medical problems she has now.. the megaesophagus, the incontinence, and the general not feeling well.

Our family was smaller, but happy.  My husband and I had just gotten married in March of 2003. We live in the same house.  We have different vehicles, though.  I still had my Toyota Pickup as I didn’t get my Outback until 2004.  Now my Outback is for sale and I have a minivan, and three more dogs.  Wow a lot can change in five years.

I wonder where I’ll be five years from now. Lucy and Angel might not be alive.. hopefully they will, but we just never know. Levi, too, will be old or gone.  Lucy would be fifteen and Levi would be fourteen. We don’t know how old Angel is but we suspect she’s around twelve now.  So she’d be seventeen, if she lives that long.

Chase will be ten, and so will Muffit. Tatum will be about eight.  And it’ll be time for a new puppy, I hope. And I will be retired, or thinking of retiring.  Which makes me very, very happy!  Maybe we’ll be moving to Richfield, Utah, and getting some property and some sheep or goats.

Where do you think you will be in five years? Where were you five years ago?

Lucy Camping

Ugh… got back from the vet for Lucy. Angel came with for the ride. Lucy didn’t get any treats at the vet… she throws them up if she does. I feel bad for her because she soooo loves the treats they have at the vet. My poor Lucy girl. The Megaesohagus is such a pain.

They tested her urine and yup, she has a bad bladder infection! I wish we would have taken her in sooner! Usually it’s my husband that insists on taking the dogs in and I say wait. But this time I wanted to take her in.  She’s on Baytril for 21 days. And they want to test her again 2 days before she’s done with the antibiotics. The vet said she has a lot of rods, and not many round cells in the bacteria… though I’m not sure what that means, I guess it means it’s a pretty bad infection. My poor girl.

She got in the house and drank a bunch, so I put her in her chair for 6 minutes. Then she just went upstairs and had another big drink. I hope the meds help her soon! Bladder infections are just awful! We got some ground beef from the grocery store and I cooked it up, put it in the blender with some water and a pill, and let her drink it in her chair.

Hopefully the pills will kick in quickly and she won’t be in pain.  If this doesn’t stop her incontenence, then we will probably look into meds for that, too. My poor baby girl.  The above picture is from a camping trip we went to in April of 2005.  Isn’t she a sweetie?

I seem to only get pictures of Lucy in her chair anymore. I need some of her standing… as she does stand and walk around too! But she is just so cute in her chair.

Lucy gets to go to the vet today.  She’s been drinking a lot, and urinating a lot, and her urine is pretty clear, which means she is drinking too much. She could have a urinary trac infection. Or the vet said she could have diabetes, so we are going to test for that too.  And if both are negative, then we will look into some incontinence medication for her.

She’s always had spay incontinence but lately it’s gotten pretty bad. She doesn’t seem to know when she has to go potty. If we make her go out (with much grumbling and growling) she will pee just fine. But if we don’t, she will just lay around and leak. And I’m quite tired of having to clean the bed and wash my sheets. I have one of those water proof mattress covers on my bed, I think it’s the only thing keeping my mattress alive. Maybe something we are feeding her is like a diuretic…? Aren’t diet pills a diuretic sometimes? We don’t give her those though!

Lucy was at the vet on Saturday too… she sounded like she was breathing heavy with something stuck in her breathing tube (what is that called anyway? hrm..). But it turns out she just has a cold, or so they said.  So she’s on benadryl. None of our other dogs seem sick in any way. I wonder if Lucy’s immune system is just weak now that she has the megaesophagus. And we always worry about her because of that, too. My silly collie girl. She’s too young to be sick. She’s not even 10 yet.

Well at long last I finally took Chase out for some agility training. It’s been quite a long time since we have done agility.. I think the beginning of September.  Got too busy with the cruise and obedience and flyball.

Chase does awesome.  My friend and trainer is pretty impressed how good he can be at agility, since he freshly comes off flyball practice and tournaments. And he still pays attention to me and remembers his agility. Though, strangely enough, he didn’t remember his distance as well as he remembered his close work.  Which is odd, because he is such a good distance dog.

This picture is of Chase, but a couple of months ago.  It was cold today, somewhere in the 50s. But Chase loves it cold.

We practice a serpentine.. I have not done many serpentine’s with him.  My friend Julie showed me how to run a serpentine… setting him up at a steep angle to the first jump, and me running in a straight line along the jumps. Wow, it worked great! Chase didn’t drop a bar and ran smoothly and hit his contact on the A-Frame.. we did the frame after the last of the 3 serpentine jumps.

It was fun, I hope to do some more agility training with him before we run in the USDAA trial December 7th.  We’ll just have fun. I entered Levi, too. In just one run a day in agility. I’m also going to enter Levi in the ASCA and UKC obedience that’s going to be there, too. He’s in novice in both, so he should do a good job! No out of sight stays!  As long as I have my eyeglasses and can see what is going on!

So… I haven’t been posting in a couple of days, instead I’ve been napping, cleaning the kitchen a little bit, doing some dog training, and kinda goofing off. Well, relaxing goofing off really. Which I need more of, and I don’t get enough of, and so I’m going to get some!

And did you know that Christmas is coming up really, really fast? Oh my gosh… I am not ready, I have to do major holiday shopping and it’s almost getting too late to do it online.

I usually pay with my credit card but I’m getting tired of paying the bill each month. So I’m looking at this new service called eBillMe. You use cash to pay… they deduct the cash amount directly out of your checking account. It’s kinda like an echeck but a little bit different. And, they are having a contest too, which would give me some cash over the holidays if I won!

So go check out the link, and you’ll be helping me win a contest! He he.. well, not sure if this blog is popular enough to get enough clicks, but I can try can’t I?

Okay back to dog training… gonna go train some agility with Chase this afternoon. Should be fun. Then I’m coming home and maybe I’ll nap again!

Okay so this part of clicker training has escaped me from the first day I started clicker training. yeah I know I’m a dork sometimes. It’s really hard for me to learn out of a book. I love to read, I love to learn about dog behavior and clicker training and how it works… there’s just a lot of it that I have to have someone answer my questions directly or else I get lost.

It’s the same with my work. I can’t learn programming out of a book. Oh.. I can learn a fair amount, but to really know it, I really have to work in a class or with a teacher.

So today during our chat discussion for my Cyber Agility course, our instructor, Helix, explained what I have been missing for years. So don’t laugh just listen. LOL

My dogs are great at offering behaviors. The offer all over the place and I’ve never understood how to get them to stop offering and only do the thing on cue! So she said… are you ready for the revelation? Wait for it….

Stop clicking the offered behavior! LOL yup, simple as that. Only click when you give the cue for the behavior, not the offering of it. Okay so see, maybe I’m just a dork, and never got that before. But now I get it and I’m excited about trying it! Though I feel kinda mean about not clicking, but Helix also said it’s just giving the dog information by not clicking. There’s no need to feel mean!

Today we went to the dog park too, and I lost Tatum for about 20 minutes. Ugh.. she is a dork. The picture above is when we just got there. I wish I could take all six dogs but I can’t handle that many just on my own, especially when I have to keep a close eye on Tatum. Not that I did good at it anyway. Someone found her, called home from her tag, and my husband gave her my cell phone number and she called my cell and she told me where my brat girl was. LOL. She even got stuck in the stream and a nice gentleman pulled her out. That Tatum… she is a brat! I love her! Fortunately I didn’t get any Plantar Fasciitis on the walk.. lol, my feet are good an healthy! And my sprained ankle hardly hurts at all anymore.

Well… I’ve been working with Tatum some. Not as much as I should, I know… but what the heck. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a big training day. The advantage to having six dogs is that if I am only supposed to work a dog for five to fifteen minutes each, and I’m in training mode, I just switch to another dog!

So anyway, Tatum is a pretty stubborn and sassy girl. All my training career (not sure if I can call it a career since I make no money.. I just spend money!) I have had trouble fading the treats. Lucy is a prime example, she would not work unless I had treats in my pocket.  It seems Tatum is becomming the same way. With Lucy, we had to put the bag away, and the when she did what I asked, we ran to the bag for treats. And then randomizing when she gets the treats.

Tatum, it seems, may think that the treat, or the lure, is part of the exercise. Like a treat in her nose and a hand going up is part of the sit.  She does know the verbal, she will, occasionally, sit for just the verbal, but not usually. And, unfortunately, I don’t really know how to effectively clicker train and fade the treats at the same time.

So this is something we are working on. And, my trainer found out that collie girls can be stubborn brats! LOL but we already knew that. I love Tatum’s sass and that’s one of the reasons I couldnt’ resist keeping her. She has a major attitude and is really full of herself.

In training her on Saturday I’d walk her around the room then tell her to sit… and she didn’t. If I didn’t lure her into it or show her the treats. So i walked away and let her stand in the middle of the room until she did something. Well, she stood for probably five to eight minutes. Not moving, just standing, with this mad look on her face.  Finally she laid down and when she did, she got a click and a treat.

Oh boy this girl is going to be a challenge. I did expect that, though. I never did know how to train Lucy, my older collie girl. Levi is such a pleaser… the boys are usually such dorks and goofy and just want to please and will do anything. Chase is more like a collie girl but he’s still a boy and has his boy ways.  Tatum… she is going to be a steep learning curve for me.

So no more luring with her, I have to put the bag of treats away, then when she does what I ask… one command at a time, like we work on sit for one week, then I’ll go and get the treats.

I don’t want to make her afraid or freak her out or anything, she does have that bad past she came from living at a hoarder’s house.  But she hasn’t cowered or stopped taking treats for months. I really think she’s not afraid anymore, she’s just being sassy!  So we’ll see how obedience goes with this sassy girl of mine!

well, finally I found a new wordpress theme that I like for this blog. yay! I was using the Dkret3 theme for years and years… and I liked it, I just got tired of customizing it every time I wanted something different.  Customizing is okay and can be fun as long as you have time… but I just don’t anymore. And so I found this free them that I like even better, anyway!

New colors and a new layout. And I love the little images I put of all my dogs in the top right corner.  Yay!  What a nice theme.. to have a sidebar option in the header. All themes should have that option!  And I like blue, even though blue has been over done in my life, because it’s kinda my favorite color.  I use it all over, but I like this blue and so I think I’ll keep it.

A new fresh theme is always nice, like a new coat of paint or a vacation and getting Outer Banks rentals for something different.

Oh and the picture.. that is Angel!  She is such a sweetie. I snapped that when we were camping last April, 2008, at Topaz Mountain.  She had a great time, as did all the dogs, and us too of course.

Well, back to work.. just wanted to say I’m excited about this new theme! I have to have a nice layout in order to want to post to my blogs. Dunno why… I just do. I like things nice and neat and clean on my laptop and my sites.  I wish I did in my house, too!