Week 1 Wrapup
I’ve been pretty swamped with work lately and haven’t had the chance to update the blog on where Monkey’s at. Between the two of us, Hannah and I have two bitches in heat right now so Monkey’s been a little out of sorts. Add that to the fact that we’re also both currently looking after a number of intact males, and things have been a little stressful for Monkey at home. During our last two sheepdog training days, he wasn’t performing as well as he normally does and my instructor thinks it’s due to the hormones, so I’ve been taking it easy on obedience with him.
I’ve seen some emotional changes in him the past couple weeks – a little more anxiety, flightiness, and some irritability. It’s nothing new, in fact, when I first picked him up last year there was a dog in heat at his old home and I thought I had a total mess of a dog on my hands at first. Once he had the chance to actually settle in and I got to know the real Monkey, so I know that this too will pass. For the time being, we are on hiatus until the vibe shifts and he can focus on his work again. This is one of the nice things about getting to train a dog of my own on my own timeline – I have all the time in the world to make sure that things go exactly the way I want them to.
For now, I’ll be focusing on a little drive capping with him to try and get his emotions back where I want them to be. I’ll make another post on that in the coming week, but for now, have a look at his Week 1 Readiness Test so you can see how I decided that he is ready to move on to some more command-response work. Readiness testing is an extremely important practice in dog training that ensures both dogs and handlers are prepared to tackle new and more difficult concepts. Failure to properly administer readiness tests at key points in a training program can lead to over-stressing the dog or “goldbricking” with a false positive result that looks nice but crumbles under pressure.
As a bonus, here’s our Day 7 training session, conducted immediately before the Readiness Test.
Follow Monkey’s training journey: