To start with, I am sorry for not visiting your blogs for a long time. I promise I will catch up shortly!!Today I would like to report how Cinnamon's obedience (no barking) training is going. She still sometimes barks at other dogs she sees in her walks, but it is becoming less and less frequent. Now she almost never barks at dogs on the other side of the road or off leash in the park. She only barks at dogs on the lead in a short distance, and sometimes she even greets such dogs nicely without barking. When she barks, it is often my fault rather than hers. For example, being eager to see her behaving nicely voluntarily, I often make a mistake of delaying the Heel command, which I now use to make Cinnamon busy doing something so that she doesn't have to worry about other dogs. If my correction is too late, it becomes hard to keep Cinnamon in a calm state.
Marge's human, Sam, has kindly suggested referring to Leslie McDevitt's book
"Control Unleashed" in her comment on my
previous post about my struggle to correct Cinnamon's barking problem. Thanks, Sam. Yes, I bought a copy of the book in September and read a third of the book during my flights to and from Japan, but the book has been left untouched on a sideboard since then. As my husband points out, I have a bad habit of buying a book and leaving it after browsing some pages. I like reading books with stories like novels, but I often find it hard to read a whole reference book. Without a story, it is hard to pick up the points that the writer wants to tell. I know that I should take notes of what I have read and learned, but I am so lazy that I usually don't bother to do that and I forget what I have read pretty soon. But I am going to take up the book again, this time to read through to the end.
Going back to the progress of Cinnamon's obedience training, I have been doing "Stay" exercises with Cinnamon as well as "Heel" exercises, following advice from a professional dog trainer who we had a training session with in late November and our great mentor,
Honey the Great Dane's human Hsin-Yi. "Stay" is something Cinnamon was no good at. When we were doing agility, I always had to start as soon as releasing Cinnamon's collar from my hand in the agility ring, because she couldn't stay at all when she was very excited. But, after doing "Stay" exercises in our daily walks everyday for a couple of weeks, her Stay is improving gradually. Now she can wait in front of a bakery without barking while I buy bread, although she can't stay lying for a long time.
In fact I am seeing a significant improvement in her general behaviour. For example, together with Cookie she always used to try to steal food from the table before, so we always used lidded containers when we wanted to have food at a coffee table. But, now we can use ordinary dishes, as Cinnamon never tries to steal anything from the table as long as we humans are around. Also, when we go out for a walk, Cinnamon sits at the gate voluntarily before I open it. But, what I am happy about most is that her picking up food from the ground has become much less.
Overall I am happy with Cinnamon's progress. Keeping doing something regularly and continuously is something I am very good at. So, I will keep at it until Cinnamon becomes a well-behaved dog.
Heeling
Staying
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