Training our dog

I've been very lazy today with respect to the red carpet post. I have been working on it but I haven't done enough to post. So instead I'll write about our sweet little doggie. She's doing so well.

She's loving having her squeaky toys lying around waiting for her to pick them up. She calms down more quickly when she can put a plush toy in her mouth and squeak it than without the toys. She's starting to properly play with her toys, too, batting them around and kind of throwing them up and catching them as though they were alive. Best of all, when we throw the plush ball she goes to get it and then brings it back and drops it in front of us. It's a proper fetch game!

We gave Gozer a bath yesterday and it went much better than it had the last few times. I'd spent the last week or so trying to get her to go into the bathroom where she gets her baths and it's paid off. The first few days I had to lure her into the bathroom by putting treats on the floor leading into the bathroom, after which I gave her lots and lots of treats. When she would come into the bathroom on her own, I started throwing treats into the tub and when she jumped in after them, I fed her more treats. When she got to that point, I turned the water on and let the water trickle out of the wand, just as it would when she had baths.

During her bath we fed her treats until she was too scared to take more of them. She doesn't like getting wet and she really doesn't like being shampooed so she trembled through that. once we started rinsing off the shampoo she took the treats again. She's gone back in there to eat some leftover treats so we know she'll go in there again. She does look beautiful with her snowy-white fur when it's clean and all brushed out so all that work is worth it.

Training is not going quite so well. We're doing a command where we say "watch", take out a treat, let her smell it, bring the treat up to our nose, wait for some amount of time, say "yes", and give her the treat. The goal is to get her to look at us and she does that. She also starts barking. She wants the treat RIGHT NOW and if she doesn't get it right away, right after it touches our nose, and she demands it. I don't want to reward her for barking but that's what we kind of end up doing when she gets the treat. I'll talk to the trainer on Sunday and see how to handle this situation.