New foster alert!
New foster alert!
We picked up this little guy yesterday from @spcanz. He’s roughly 5weeks old, and pretty small, scrawny and malnourished, with a giant lollipop head and skinny wee body. He’s really sad and shut down compared to his siblings so we picked him as the one we could help the most 💔
He needs a name? Unique and interesting ideas welcome! Chuck them in the comments below!
Fetch?
Poodle’s idea of ‘inside fetch’ 😂
Show me the lame and weird games your dogs have invented and somehow taught you to play that they think are the best games ever!
For anyone wondering, this is why I don’t post nearly as many videos as Thinkdog with Lewis Nicholls - he ruins them all! 😂
If in doubt, PLAY
If in doubt, PLAY 🥰
When they no longer give AF 🥱
The best feedback Poodle can give me about his cooperative care training is when he falls asleep mid groom. Considering how body sensitive and untrusting he was as a wee guy, this outcome always makes me insanely proud of how far we have come together as a team. It’s taken constant work, but man is it worth it. Not just so I can groom him easily, but for what it’s done to our relationship as a whole.
If you’re in the middle of working towards a training goal, keep going!
If you have a goal but haven’t started yet because the mountain seems to big to climb, get in touch ❤️
Www.Thinkdog.nz
Expanding the world of a fearful dog…
Expanding the world of a fearful dog…
…Takes a lot of patience, and a lot of checking and rechecking of our expectations.
It’s a tricky job because you must completely relinquish control, make the active choice to accept whatever outcome you get and learn not to impose your goals on your dog. Sunny taught us this.
Any attempt to force or rush a dog to get over their fears before they’re ready will often completely backfire - 2 steps forward, 15 steps back.
Since Sunny graced us with her presence (HA!) in 2020 we’ve developed a system for expanding her world and for anyone that’s interested, it looks a bit like this:
We’ll take her out at every opportunity we get. When we arrive at our destination we’ll check our surroundings. If and only if there is absolutely no people or dogs in sight, we’ll open her Ute crate and then we leave her alone and go about doing whatever we’d planned to do with the other dogs - play with toys or do a training session etc.
If it’s the 1st or 2nd (or maybe the 3rd) time she’s been to that location, she’ll probably plaster herself deep in the back of the crate and stay there the whole time. We don’t lure or coax or encourage, we leave her alone. She’s already said no with her body language.
Around the 3rd or 4th time, magic happens. She’ll be at the front of the crate when we go to open it, not the back. She’ll be kinda wild eyed and flighty, but she’s making a little leap of faith, like someone working up the courage to bungy jump. At this point we add a little bit of verbal praise and excitement - still not actually asking her to come out - and she’ll usually get out of the Ute by herself all waggy bummed and silly.
Historically, she’d then yo-yo in and out, as if testing to see if the air outside the crate was poisonous. These days however, she’s much more likely to stay out for the majority of the outing, taking food and practicing tricks or beating up Poodle (favourite hobby).
If the purpose of the outing is to meet your dog’s needs, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with following their lead as to what kind of walk they want.
Sometimes Adira wants to run REALLY FAST (the only time she can safely do so is on lead), sometimes she wants to sniff reeeaaaaallllyyyyyy slow, sometimes she wants to train and use her brain, sometimes she doesn’t want to leave the property at all and really wants to play with toys. We pretty much let her decide if it’s an outing for her anyway.
Today she wanted to train. She wasn’t having a bar of the slow sniffy walk i had in mind, which is absolutely fine. So we practiced her automatic stops - stopping when I do. We practiced her ‘find it’ cue to put her nose down and hunt out the biffed food treat or target odour for scent-work. And we practiced her loose-heel, where she follows and targets our right outer-thigh with her cheek.
We covered a total of 1.2km, and it took us almost 40mins. It wasn’t a failed walk because we didn’t go far, it was a perfect walk, because it gave her exactly what she needed.
Cosmo is all of 9 weeks old now and we've had him for a little over a week. While pups are only baby-babies at this age, sleeping roughly 20 hours a day, the amount of learning that's going on in that 4 hours of awake time is astounding.
They're capable at this age of forming so many important associations that lay the groundwork for all of their later skills and habits to build off of, and we often remark at the stark contrast in life-skill level between the foster pups we raise from 8-12weeks old (like Cosmo), versus the ones we only get at 12weeks. So many habits are already forming!
Aside from the normal sits and downs and please don't pee in the house - he's already learning how to be ok with not accessing what he wants RIGHT NOW, how to sleep in a crate overnight, how to relax at a cafe, how to interact with (or leave alone) a variety of adult dogs and their differing personalities, how to ignore chickens and sheep, how to focus on humans when there's other stuff going on, how to tolerate being handled, how to feel about strange people, how to feel about strange environments - the list is enormous!
Some of the training is active, but the majority of it is passive and comes along for the ride through the way we've set the environment up and the way we respond to him in different circumstances.
If you want to learn how to raise a bad-ass puppy that's happy, robust, easy to live with and a pleasure to be around - Lewis is vlogging a 'Raising Cosmo' series over on our website.
To access to this series and the other 200 odd video tutorials, sign up to our Bronze subscription to gain video access - there's a 7 day no obligation free trial so if it's not for you, that's all good too!
https://www.thinkdog.nz/puppy-training
Video from yesterday at Cosmo's first cafe visit 🥳
If you're besotted with this little guy like we are, he IS available for adoption! Get in touch with Paws - Restart if you'd like to meet him 🥰
Is your 6-12 month old puppy an embarrassment out in public? Here’s what to do.
Reward them more frequently. Seriously, It’s that simple.
Why?
The adolescent brain flies at a million miles an hour, they are easily excitable and have very little ability to inhibit their own behaviour. Often, the things they could do at 4 months old, they can no longer do at 6-12months old. They’re not trying to be a pain in the ass, they’re literally in a period of brain development that is all go and no stop.
We can help them through this by rewarding them far more readily for doing all the things we want them to do, which will help steer them away from all the things we don’t want them to do. We don’t wait for them to get it wrong - we want to make it SO WORTH THEIR TIME to do what we want, that they barely consider other options.
Take 6month old Scooby here for example, this is a 7minute video sped up. He’s only just started training with us. This is his 4th loose leash walk ever, and his first time in Bunnings. He literally loose leash walks and focuses for 7 whole minutes (that’s a lot in puppy time) - not because he has developed this as a skill or a habit yet - but because I am reinforcing him readily enough to maintain his attention on me.
That’s how to train new habits that don’t exist yet (Loose leash walking & focus).
That’s how you stop them doing the old thing you don’t want them to do anymore (pull all over the place & greet all the people).
Overtime you need less frequent food to maintain the behaviour that you want, and you’ve not needed to tell them off to get there. Ta daa!
If they won’t take food or can’t concentrate at all - then we either need to find a reward they want more (maybe toys or movement) and/or we need to find an easier environment to practice in first. We don’t fight them or try to force the point - if they don’t want what you’ve got then you’re pushing s**t uphill trying to MAKE them focus. It doe
A quick reminder that no dog is perfect and ‘most’ dogs are opportunists. Most of the things we want our dogs to do, or to not do, go against their natural inclinations. Given the opportunity, in situations you haven’t specifically trained for - most dogs are going to behave like dogs. Laugh when it happens, you’ll feel better for it 😉
This is Adira’s handy work, if anyone was interested! She’s learnt how to open the pantry door! Luckily, I wasn’t home, so Thinkdog with Lewis Nicholls had to clean it up 😂
*Cooperative Care Training Group*
EDIT: Applications have closed for this round. I received approximately 1 billion too many keen beans! Will do another round in a couple of months so keep an eye out!
Who would be interested in being part of a training group for guidance & support towards cooperative care goals?
I am looking for 5-10people who are keen to work towards anything husbandry related goals - nail clipping, vet checks, brushing, injections, eye drops, harnessing etc.
The format will be as a closed group where we can all ask questions, post videos for feedback, you'll receive specific homework tailored to you & your dog and I'll use the dogs I have in my care to demo next steps / final goals etc.
There IS a cost to joining this group, however it will be significantly cheaper than working one on one with me, with the idea of making cooperative care accessible to everyone.
Who's keen?
(wee video of Adira, our deaf & blind pup who is just starting to learn how to file her own nails because she is THE CUTEST)
Another day, another 'doing nothing and watching the world go by' passive training session for Mr Poodle - who can get a bit jazzy (aka feral) in busy environments if we don't practice regularly. There's just soooo many exciting new best friends who are surely all there just for him?! How can he POSSIBLY be expected to contain himself?! 🤦♀️
Don't underestimate the magical power of letting your dogs just chill out and watch stuff without any exciting outcome (unlike in this video where Thinkdog with Lewis Nicholls sabotages our serenity 😛). So many of our outings and training sessions are active and exciting - it's important to balance all that out with a good ol' dose of nothing occasionally.
What has everyone else been working on recently?
Our dog’s experience today will influence their compliance tomorrow.
If we force them today to save time, we’re risking having an even more avoidant dog in the future. But if we take our time to make today more enjoyable or tolerable for them, then we’re investing in a future where they’ll be easier and more willing to cooperate.
Not to mention it’s just plain old nicer for them too ❤️
How to not lose your deaf & blind dog at the beach:
Step 1 - attach said deaf/blind dog to a more reliable dog via a tug toy that neither dog will ever ever ever let go of,
Step 2 - keep a very long long-line dragging as a backup in case one of the dogs decides to prove you wrong and does let go,
Step 3 - RUN AND GRAB THE LONG LINE BEFORE SHE'S LOST FOREVER
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, for more brilliant dog training advice, check out our website 😂😛
Following on from the post a couple weeks back about the benefits of doing nothing with your dog - post a video below of your 'doing nothing' session with your dog out in public to go into the draw to win 10 un-redeemable brownie points! Bonus points if you let me know which environments they find the hardest.
www.thinkdog.nz
Fueled by Nature's Ki - Pet Wellbeing
PASSIVE TRAINING
Most of the stuff we want our dogs to do or not do doesn't require a complex training plan. For a lot of it, all it really requires is a bit of thought and a lot of consistency to slowly change the way our dogs feel about certain things.
Take fence running as an example - if we'd just let Moana repeat the behaviour of running up and down the fence line barking at our goats, that undesirable behaviour would have gotten stronger & more ingrained every time she practiced it, making it harder and slower to change over time.
But by:
1. preventing physical access to a fenceline with sheep/goats on the opposite side by exercising her in different areas of the property or having her on a long line,
2. preventing visual access by putting up shade cloth on the fence so she can't see through it when she's unsupervised, and
3. making sure that when she WAS sharing a fence with them she was busy having fun doing something else + we were close by and actively supervising...
we've slowly desensitized Mo to their presence so that having a goat or a sheep close by no longer means a fun chase opportunity, it simply means nothing. Not once have we set up a training session to work specifically on this (that I can remember). Sure targeted training may have sped things up, but the point is that a lot can be achieved by just being mindful about what you're allowing and encouraging your dog to spend their time on.
‼️ Facebook gets the little snippets of our training content - the majority can be found on our website which you can now access with a 7-day free trial on our bronze and bronze + memberships - www.thinkdog.nz/members
Multidog households can be very chaotic, but they really don't have to be. By teaching your team certain skills and habits, you can find peace and order amongst the dog hair and muddy paw prints.
If you'd also like access to all of our exclusive content, we're now offering a 7-day free trial to our online community! - www.thinkdog.nz
Fueled by Nature's Ki - Pet Wellbeing
Another day, another cafe practice session for Kobe. He's progressed so much over his time with us it's hard to even remember how difficult this setting would have been for him a few months ago. But even though he's doing great, it's important to remember that practice doesn't make perfect - practice makes PROGRESS. He's still a sentient being with his own preferences and feelings - not to mention also being an adolescent!
I'm going to miss him (and all this extra caffeine) when he goes home! 🤪
Fueled by Nature's Ki - Pet Wellbeing
Supposed to be working out, but I can't get anything done with Baby Dog around, she's just way too endearing, I can't bare to refuse her play requests!
Guess the ab dream can wait for another year 😂
#dogsoverabs #pufferfish
