Venn reached the dizzy heights of 3 months old just as the B&B moved into its busiest season. Between cooking breakfast, hoovering and dog-training there is little space for anything else.
An important milestone was passed this week when Venn met her surrogate carers J & C (laden with treats) for the first time. There were a few Tess-tears shed on arrival, but Venn took to them right away, and C didn’t seem too phased by the prospect of early starts when dog-sitting. I trust it was the start of another long and valuable friendship for all concerned. Rewardingly, no blood was shed during this episode, which is more than can be said for their first encounter with Kip!
So what news of the little lady herself?
Well, it looks like we spoke too soon on the sleeping-through front: the waking timings slowly crept back to 5:20 a.m. to the point that we are now letting her go to the loo, then putting her back to bed, and are then waking her at 6:30 to get some work done before breakfast starts.
Equally, the separation anxiety and consequent barking is still a feature of daily life. Actually I’m not that sure it is separation anxiety as she doesn’t seem that anxious; with much of the same genetic makeup as Kip, it is more likely that she is just worried she is missing something more interesting. Given the significantly greater amounts of time spent playing in the garden over the last four weeks, Kip is also super-sensitive to being locked away in case she too is missing out. At the guests’ breakfast time, this seems to come to a head. Kip, who has, ‘till now, happily spent this part of her morning in our apartment snoozing, currently finds she needs to bark to check whether it is time to come out. If I leave the kitchen to send her back to bed, then Venn starts up with the dawn chorus. It is like a giant game of whack-a-mole (without the hammer, obvs)
It has been a bit of a wet week, and on past performance I wondered how we would dissipate some of that energy, if Venn disliked the rain so much. Fortunately she discovered that her joy for playing with Kip outweighed any negative aspects of being in the wet and the problem went away.
Working on the principle of using quiet, familiar surroundings for training, we have continued to make progress. In the quiet of Jacky’s shed we can manage “sit”, “down”, “down-to-sit”, “stay “ (10 seconds), a “nose to palm” and “eye-contact.” The last two are tools to help develop more complex skills down the line. Having said we can manage a 10 second stay (which seems like an awful long time with a puppy) I’m not convinced it is actually a “stay” and not just a “happy lying where I am” or “can’t be bothered standing”.
And while we are laying our cards on the table, there is also the issue of “down” Much of the movement of basic commands such as sit, down and down-to-sit is shaped by moving a treat next to the puppy’s nose. At some point the treat disappears and the hand action remains, with rewards to follow. Once this is in the bag, the hand signals remain, but are performed further away. We are pretty good with “sit” at a small distance, but Venn has understood “down” to mean “down with my nose next to his hand”, and the further I move back the more dramatic the pounce to achieve this.
We have done quite a lot of lead work over the week (probably more than we did with the other two in their entire lives), and she is doing pretty well. That is, unless she needs the loo in which case she bites the lead and spins around on it like some Cirque du Soleil act.
Perhaps the achievement of the week has been with the “recall” training. We are following a programme to develop this, and for the last four weeks I have been suddenly running away from her, and once confident she is running towards me, making the “come” command. It was recommended that the next phase, making the command and then running, should not happen before 12 weeks of age, so today was the day. It was quite a big deal, as if she ignored it, we were back to another week of run/call. Anyway, she was absolutely fine. Well, mostly. It really hyped her up, and by the 6th go, she achieved what could only be described as a fly-by before running in circles at full tilt for at least 5 minutes none-stop. Fewer repetitions next time, I think. We have a week of call/run and then we try call/walk. The ultimate goal is of-course call/stand still but we are a way off that. It has been a nerve-wracking few weeks with no means of calling her back, and on the occasions where we have lost sight, we have had to rely on digging Kip out of her bed to wander around as a lure. Who’d’ve thought Kip would be the one saving the day.
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