Vito's 5.5 month video is up!!! I had a lot of fun teaching Vito's these tricks. I especially love backing up the stairs, I just wish that we had more stairs in our place than those 3! Vito is still struggling with the stacking bowls trick though. At first he wanted to stand in him (way to generalize from the food bowl, yay!) and now he understands his job is to pick them up but has much difficulty. Part of his problem is that he is moving...

fickla

Snip snip snip Vito is officially an "it" today. I'm not really sure if I agree that every pet dog should be spayed/neutered, but because of our lifestyle I figured it was the best for him. I don't really know enough to really talk about it, but spaying and neutering isn't as great as we once thought it was.

From my understanding, neutering can actually increase the male's chance of getting cancer (especially prostate cancer, but others as well), especially if done under...

fickla

Now that spring is FINALLY here I can start moving my training outside! I've been dragging out the long wooden board and starting to teach Vito running contacts. Even though running contacts are still controversial in the agility world, I plan to use Silvia Trkman's method (my hero!) as it's the easiest (plus she's the one who invented running contacts). Just put a board on the ground, have dog race over the board to a target, and gradually raise the height of the board until you have full dogwalk...

fickla

Vito and I have made great progress with our retrieving work. He will bring a toy thrown back to my hand 95% of the time (not always when other dogs are around) with no reward other than a game of tug or just another throw. Even with plastic, leather, and metal dumbbells he will run after and bring it back (I use treats for dumbbells to make it extra cool!). So I have no regrets (yet) about my decision to allow him to roll the dumbbell into my hand at first and then raise the height of my hand so...

fickla

I have already started a blog on blogger (The Dogs Are Really In Charge), but thought that I would copy and paste some stuff over here!

So here goes a series of updates on how my training is going with Lance and Vito. There may also be some posts on my kitty and ferrets

Edit: Is there a way to post pictures to this blog directly from my computer? From what I can tell I have to have them on another website already...? I tried from my Picasa site, but the pics aren't...

fickla