Puppy Pre-school #4

We did a lot today! I am tired and so is Harley.

When we got there we let Harley go play with the other puppies and boy did he play. Ike was there along with Kaboose, Cody and a pit puppy (can't remember her name). She was only there for play time as was Ike. So there were only 3 of us there for class which was kind of nice. It wasn't as chaotic today, it was more laid back. We still worked really hard though. First we did our sets of 5 sits and 5 downs. Harley was great with both. We worked on a bunch of stuff today: stay, leave it, mat work, impulse control work and I can't remember what else right now. lol The impulse control is to get him to stay sitting when I give him his bowl of food or water. Also to keep him sitting when I have food in my hand. It really was a lot today but in a good way. He peed in the room every time he had to go though. The door was closed and he didn't know to go to that door and sit. He also was excited or scared and peed because of that. Lots of clean up on Aisle 2 today. lol

I also asked Christine about Harley running along the fence with Zeus and she doesn't think that's a good idea. She wants me to work on calling him away from the fence using a high value treat (such as hot dogs). I definitely need to do more work with him on calling him by his name to get him to come to me. Although he did do better today coming to me but there weren't quite as many distractions as there usually are. Overall he did really well with everything.

We have 2 more puppy classes and then the week of October 4th Christine will be away. I guess we will start another class after that. I'm not sure that other folks will be staying with the class or not so I'll have to see what will happen. I definitely want to keep Harley in classes though.

Christine took more pictures today. I need to send her an email and ask if she would send some of them to me. I'm so busy during class that I don't have time to take pictures. And I didn't take the camera or my cell phone today anyway.

I think I figured out some things that I need to do differently in training. Doing the mat work I need to be further away from the mat. I need to toss it down and then motion him to go down from a distance, then treat him. With leave it I need to add the floor component to the exercise. I also need to treat him every time I call him by name and he comes to me. It's the little things that I need to add in, the details. I can see that I'm starting to have some issues with Harley because I'm not doing the training the way I need to or as much as I should. I'm also not walking him enough. That has to change.

He'll probably sleep for about an hour or so then he'll be full of energy again. I didn't feed him any lunch because he gets about that much in treats. He'll get dinner though. I'll practice some of the stuff that Christine showed me when it comes time to feed him tonight. Okay, time for me to relax.