this past weekend

mr. bear's head shot

lazy saturday morning

freshly shorn!

he looks so skinny with his hair short!

training - go to bed

this command is really a mixed bag for me and wally.  he’s really, really good at going to bed when I give him the command… it probably helps that he loves his bed so much!  so he’s good at going to bed, and he’s good at staying there even when I try to distract him with food and toys.  however, getting him to stay in his bed when someone knocks on the door… whew!

he just gets so amped up whenever there’s a knock on the door!  and I can’t trick him with training by knocking on the door myself while he’s in the bed… he figured out pretty quickly that I was knocking.  so I’ve worked with him on it as much as I can, and he’s getting better… but of course, he is my little work in progress!

I can gladly report, though, that throughout the training I haven’t gotten any growls out of him, even when I have to push him into a down kinda hard.  I feel pretty confident that he’s starting to really trust joe and me, which is a great feeling!

training - sit-stay, down-stay

as I said before, wally was pretty solid with sit when we first brought him home.  he wasn’t so good at stay, though, and we certainly weren’t trying down very hard with him since he bit gina’s mom when she tried showing us.  I explained to steve that wally wasn’t very receptive to being pushed or pulled, but steve showed us a way to get wally to sit by applying pressure to pressure points right above his hips and how to get him to go down just by pushing him over from a sit.  

part of what steve taught is that whenever joe or I give the sit or down command, the “stay” command should just be expected.  so when wally goes into a sit or a down, he has to just stay there til we give him the break command.  so wally’s got sit-stay down pat.  now, the down-stay… that’s a slightly different story.

wally knows what the command means.  he’s demonstrated it time and again when steve is actually in the house with us.  however, when it’s just the two of us, he hardly ever goes down on the first command.  one of my big mistakes was repeating the command a couple of times before enforcing the command (giving him a push into the down).  if he knows you’re going to give him a couple of free passes before enforcing it, he’s going to take advantage of it.  it’s taking me some practice, but I’m getting better at simply saying the command once.  most of the time he doesn’t immediately go down, but I’ve gotten to the point where he just sees me start to bend down to him and he goes down on his own.  not perfection… but it’s a start!  once he’s in the down, though, he’s really great at staying there until we release him.  it’s that initial obedience that he has a little trouble with.  again, I’m sure that his home before us never enforced rules or obedience in any way, so in a way, it’s rehabilitation and not necessarily teaching him a new trick.  the act of going into his down is more of a psychological exercise than it is anything else.