Weekly Review: 3/1/19

 Review Of This Week:

The three things I had set for drake and I to work on this week were:

• Continue transferring Drake's alert cue to an environmental cue.
• Continue working on stimulus control with a focus on while I'm seated.
• One long outing into public (more than an hour)

Due to a veterinary emergency with a different dog, Drake didn't get the amount of training I would have liked this week.  We did a few sessions on transferring his alert (which is going great) and a few sessions with stimulus control while I'm sitting (which is not going so great).

So, instead of training videos and reviews to show you I have a different lesson for you:

Sometimes life gets in the way of your training, and thats OK.

Don't get me wrong, making training a daily habit is really, really important to your success. If you don't train, you won't improve, and if you don't train regularly you'll never get anything to really stick.  But sometimes life happens and training gets paused.

It simply was not feasible for Drake to have a lot of training this week.  Beginning Wednesday I had very little time for training and during the time I did have I wasn't in the best place mentally for training, and when I'm not in a good place mentally, nothing constructive happens during our training sessions.  So we didn't train.  

And you know what, nothing horrible happened.  The sky didn't fall, the world didn't end, and Drake is still his normal happy self.  

If we had trained when I hadn't felt up to it the least that would have happened would have been that nothing got accomplished.  But worse things could have happened, due to a full stress bucket on my end (which always gives me a  very low tolerance for frustration) I could have poisoned cues and behaviors that we've worked 12 months to achieve, I could have hurt my relationship with him.

Know yourself and find the balance.  Know which days you should push through and train anyway and know which days you should just sit on the couch and cuddle with your amazing SDiT.  And, if you confuse the two and start training when you shouldn't have, and things start going down hill, set the training aside and do something fun and pressure free instead.

Now, I do have a couple of things to share that are more directly related to training, and that is sharing with you how our trip to Texas Roadhouse went.

Saturday, after the dust had settled here, we had family come into town and we all went to Texas Road House for dinner, you know, the restaurant with the peanuts everywhere and with the worst layer for moving people around ever.  Yup, that's the place.  And, we went at 6:00pm on a Saturday.  So things were a tad busy.

Drake actually handled the peanuts on the floor like a champ and laid under the table great for the whole dinner.  The challenging part was actually while we were waiting for a table.

We waited about 20 minutes in a super cramped area with lots of moving people, and I'll be honest, Drake struggled a little.  I've never been good totally surrounded by people, it makes my claustrophobic and messes with my anxiety, so this may have been the first time Drake had to deal with a handler who was anxious but looking back.  I actually used some of his grounding tasks to help me stay calmer and give him something to think about other than all the people crowding him.

It was also the first time he had to be in such cramped quarters with so many people at once and since he's small and back, and Texas Roadhouse is dark with black floors, he blended in and got bumped into quite a few times.

I'm actually really happy with how he did but he did struggle a little so here are my main takeaways-reminders-notes-things to work on from that outing:

• Service dogs get bumped into in public, this is something we need to prepare our dogs for.  There will eventually be a whole lesson on this in the academy, and this outing showed me that Drake needs a little more work in this area to be comfortable with being bumped into by strangers.
  
  
• Take breaks when you or your dog needs them.  Twice Drake and I stepped outside for a few minutes to take a break and get some space.  Once because I needed it and once because he needed it.  Drake got bumped into three times a row and he got really squirrelly.  Instead of "fighting" with him about his sit stay, we just stepped outside so he could have a break.  
  
  There's no point in stressing yourself or your dog out when you can take a break and get some air.  In fact, it can be down right necessary.  Had I not given Drake the break he needed, he could have quickly become more stressed and we may have had to leave permanently. 
  
  
• Never feel like you can't increase your rate of reinforcement with an advanced dog.  Drake heels great, even with food on the ground, but he's never had to heel with so many peanuts and peanut shells on the ground while people on all sides are telling him how cute he is.  I increased his rate of reinforcement whenever we moved through the restaurant.