Monday, April 03, 2006

Well, it was back to work for the girls today. Lola is going through a very ~ahem~ "active" stage. And we haven't done a whole lot of anything since graduation. So I took her upstairs and ran through all of the basic stuff she knows, focusing on attention. I never really got around to cueing it so I started introducing "Watch". We'll continue to work on that this week.

Penny was antsy all night. She "knew" it was class day. And she was ready to work. I'm so proud of her. We worked on heeling, direction changes, down, lots of attention & supervised separation. Heeling was great. Her attention is stellar. Down is fine...although she refuses to tip onto one hip. I may try to shape this during the course of the week. The separation is another issue. I suppose I should be happy to have a dog that's so bonded to me. We did two run throughs, leaving her w/ Jim, Annette's assistant. I got about 20 seconds out of her until she started to stress. We're gonna keep at it & hopefully, she'll get better. I'm going to try to work on out of sight stays as well & hope that will give her a job to do while I'm gone, making the whole thing less stressful. I really love this class and love working with Penny.

I realize I don't make any reference to working with Sherman. And it's not that he doesn't get any attention. But Sherman is different than the girls. They really thrive on mental stimulation while Sherman is more content to chew or play with a toy or do some fun basic commands. Which he does get a lot of. He's certainly not neglected.