The Voice Awakens (10 weeks)

How quickly the days fly by when you are not sleeping!

This week Venn has found her voice, developing that puppy whine into a fully-fledged and piercing bark (now where did she learn that from I wonder??). Quite often and for long periods of time. Already we have created a monster!

The trainers are quite clear on the matter; if you make a fuss over a barking dog, it rewards the behaviour and the dog learns an effective way in gaining your attention. Picture the scene for us though: a small dog with a big voice wakes up at 6:00 a.m. and starts barking loudly in a room directly below one where paying guests are trying to sleep. It is a dead-fire certainty that one of us will leap immediately out of bed and try to quieten her, if only for the Trip Advisor reviews. Hey presto the dog learns an important lesson, and quickly starts to apply it to other situations when she is bored throughout the day. It is easier for us to ignore her in the daytime, but the message seems to have lodged nonetheless. It is not easy to see how we can break the cycle, as there is no way we can have her creating in the early hours.

In other news, Venn’s night-time wee-break has been slowly pushed back from 2:00 a.m. when she first arrived, to 4:00 a.m. (and ready to go back again). So that’s good. The morning wake-up is stubbornly fixed at 6:00 a.m. which is less so.

On the food front things have gone better. Rather than try and entice her with all manner of fancy food, we went back to her puppy kibble, with an egg scrambled and mixed through it as a concession to being over-anxious. We have also only left food on the floor for an hour or less after mealtime. This has all worked out fairly well and she is eating pretty much what the manufacturers advise (albeit on the low end of the scale).

With the return to structured meal times of kibble, Venn’s appetite for higher quality training snacks (currently smoked mackerel cubes and liver cake) has greatly improved and we have made some reasonable progress. She has a fairly reliable “sit” when I am low down and close, and we are working on a bit of longer range and standing commands. We have a functional “down” again at close quarters, and we are just making a start on “wait” and “stay”.

Recall is very much a work in progress and we are in the early stages of a training schedule addressing the matter (I have an entire book dedicated to the issue). It is very much about obtaining the action and relating it to the command at the moment (i.e. giving the command as she is running towards me) and we are a couple of weeks away from starting to think about using the command to create the action. It is a nerve-wracking time; we have no effective means of calling her back, but she is increasingly interested in exploring the grounds, and saying hello to guests as they arrive or depart. As well as normal lead work, we have started working on a 15 m long-line, which at least gives me something to grab in an emergency!

Venn's first tick this week!

We really don't like the rain, still.

Off to the stock-market again