Yesterday Lance went to a rally obedience run through at one of the local clubs in the cities. Lance had never been there before so I thought it would be perfect to treat it like a "real show" and even brought cheese for treats and his canned food for afterward. It was a really long course, with 2 serpentines and 2 spirals. I did it all off leash and while he was a little distracted I was able to call him back to me really easily. His sits were very crooked in the beginning but improved...

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The past couple of days I've been doing a lot of targeting work with my dogs. It has also caused me to reflect on how useful targeting is and I thought I would devote a post solely to targeting.

For the non dog trainer readers, targeting is simply teaching the dog to touch his nose or paw to something. In puppy classes, I start out with the dog nose to owner's hand targeting. Stuff to do with hand targeting:

1. Keep your dog's attention on YOU and not everything else in...

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Lance is really the perfect dog At agility Thursday the instructor was reminding us all to pay attention to where our feet are pointed. There had been quite a few screw ups where the handlers meant to tell the dog to go one way, but since their body was twisted dogs naturally went to where the owners feet were telling them- good dogs!

When it was Lance's turn to go, he illustrated this so perfectly it was ridiculous. As soon as I had Lance in a "wait" at the start line...

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I'm fairly certain that little Vito has been going through a fear period the last 2 weeks. He is 7.5 months old now and is suddenly a lot more skittish about changes in his environment.

The funniest example, to me anyway, occurred a couple evenings ago. We had just put the ferrets away and were taking down the baby gate to let the dogs outside when suddenly all the fur on Vito's back when straight up and he started his high pitch shrill barking. I think I heard a couple of growls in...

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Today Vito sang for his very first time! In daycare today 2 of his girl friends where barking at each other and when I went over to "yell" at them they suddenly burst into song. Quickly some of the other singers joined in and Vito just stared at the them intently. Usually the dogs only sing on Wednesdays when 2 mastiffs and their lab neighbor start up the group a couple times each morning. Vito has heard them sing before, but the main group was always on the other side of the fence. Today...

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