First night at class

Grey was one of two puppies at the KC Puppy Foundation class who mostly wrestled for the whole thing. The other was his new friend, Angel a gorgeous Husky GDX cross wrestling with him. Getting into the class was a really clever affair. Each puppy was brought in seperately. Grey was last getting into the hall. All the other puppies were sat with their owners at the back. There was no manic barking or jumping about. It was a real surprise when we got in. The floor of the hall was covered with scattered cuddly toys and treats. If Grey knew that Christmas existed, he'd have thought that this was it. Predictably he spent most of the time head down, sniffing out treats, then the rest of the class playing with Angel.

The class was introduced to the clicker. Grey has been clicker trained since the first day I got him at 7.5 weeks. The trainer advocated the technique of clicking a behaviour that happens rather then luring. We worked through 'sit' which Grey already knows, and then loose lease walking (LLW), which Grey is notoriously bad at. I was told to walk at a quicker pace than the other puppies because it seemed to hold his attention more.

He's super interested in other dogs despite us doing a fair bit of socialisation and meeting other dogs out and about. This can make classes difficult for him to concentrate in a class. I'd already read that puppy training classes can pose a problem because of the massive distractions and the best is worked out alone out of the class. But all in all it was a great class with low stress levels for the dogs.

Homework for this week is to perfect the sit with a single voice cue and hand signal and also to work on LLW.

Clicker sites and mailing lists I've found really useful:
Clicker Solutions website
Clicker Solutions discussion group
Sue Ailsby's levels training
The Levels discussion group
The Training Levels Tracker