Weekly Training Update (Dec 18)

Lilly and I went to our last class of the year on Wednesday. And, I’m sad to say she had a rough time. It all started with a young, standard poodle who came charging at us (in play) right off the bat. We tried walking away, but Lilly ended up having to engage. She did fine at first with a relatively calm (yet stiff) sniff, but when the dog didn’t go away, Lilly decided to show her teeth and snark.

Honestly, I think the youngster didn’t know what to do with Lilly’s tension, so she just stood still, which is a pretty smart thing to do … really. It’s such a shame Lilly doesn’t always read things right and chooses to react.

It wasn’t anything terrible. Her lip curling and growling were actually pretty controlled. The dog eventually responded to calls to move away.

After that, Lilly seemed to settle in fairly well and work, but her heart just wasn’t in it, so we mostly kept our distance from the group.

After we worked on LEAVE IT and WHOA, the dogs practiced some STAYS. (You can see the poodle on the far right of this shot.)

Later, we worked on STAY with other dogs moving around, so I positioned Lilly near a tree, which meant people would have to give us wider berth as they went around, but I miscalculated the tree’s draw, especially for male dogs. So, Lilly ended up snarking at the yellow lab behind us in the photo above when he stopped to sniff the tree. Lilly thought he was a tad too close.

Poor guy. He wasn’t really paying attention to her at all and got hollered at (by Lilly) for it. He looked so surprised.

After that, she pretty much decided she had had enough and shut down in that uniquely Lilly way.

She slept all the way back to our part of town, so I ran a couple errands and then took her for a quick walk along the creek. Since it was mid-day, during the week, the path was pretty empty, so I let her have the full length of her training lead and just let her walk as she pleased. That improved her mood.

Still, I was pretty bummed. Blame it on the dark time of the year, blame it on the never-ending family medical drama that consumes so much of my bandwidth, or blame it on the cold, but I had hoped to end on the year of so much progress on a better note.

***

We may have a new contender in the friend department. One of the young guys who lives across the road just got a puppy with his fiance. The dog’s name is Toby, and he is a doodle of some sort (probably labra-doodle) and came from Kansas or Nebraska, which makes me worry about puppy mill origins, but he looks like a real sweetie.

I haven’t met him yet, but when they get back from their holiday travels (he is going along), I hope to see him in person and give Lilly a chance to meet him on her own turf. He isn’t a tiny boy, so who knows. His size and puppiness may be too much for her.

{Photos missing due to massive blog glitch. So sorry.}