Training Ani: March 2012

A New Beginning

Blumoon Anticipates A Landslyde!
CH Sunaire Living The Dream x Blumoon Deja Blue Happily Ever After -"Ani" was born on December 8, 2010. She was the last puppy born in a litter of 7, co-bred by me and Kim Lappen. I knew Ani was mine from the moment she was born. She was just THAT puppy. But as time wore on it became evident that she was growing... a lot. We kept hoping that she would stay in size, and holding our breaths. She even went to live with our friend Kathy Ryan, Marco's owner, for some early breed training. Eventually she stopped growing, but pushed the size chart all the way to 16". She is still a very pretty girl.
I didn't spend much, if any time training Ani because I was preoccupied with other things. Tia's health was failing again, I went to grooming school and then worked at finding a job in a new career, I was training Libby in agility. There just never seemed to be time for Ani. In July 2011 I took Ani for a private lesson with Nicole Levesque, thinking that a lesson might jump start me into actually training her. We worked on ideas for overcoming her terrible issue with car sickness and then started with simple exercises such as sit, down, hand touches, regular recalls and restrained recalls. I train exclusively with positive reinforcement and a clicker. Ani understands that a click means something good. Nicole also suggested that I do lots of tug work with our "fur tail", which Ani really enjoys. Unfortunately I really didn't keep up with the exercises. Bad trainer.

Having just lost Tia, my heart dog on January 10, 2012, I decided that my new focus must be on Ani. She is my next "project". About a month ago I spoke with my friend and animal communicator Anne Hassett, who was helping me through my overwhelming ordeal with Tia. Tia always had such a great sense of humor. She asked Anne where that "other" sheltie in the house had come from! She actually sounded disgusted with her! I asked why and she said because "she has no work ethic"! That made me laugh. I hope Tia imparted some words of wisdom to Ani before she left. Ani has some pretty big paws to fill. This blog will document our journey.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Mat work

Progress with Ani has been slow. Partly my fault for not being consistent in my training schedule and partly because Ani seems to be a bit of a slow learner. She is such a social butterfly and would much rather meet new friends (canine or human) and be doing something fun. I guess that means I have to make our training sessions more fun! This morning I finally watched some of the "Control Unleashed" Game Demo DVD's by Leslie McDevitt, that I borrowed from the TMAC library recently. I absolutely love the books, and the DVD's definitely help to visualize the exercises better. I had been working on the "Mat" exercise a few weeks ago, prior to watching the DVD, and our progress was very slow. Ani just wasn't getting it. But after watching the video we had a wonderful training session! I kept it short and fun, and she offered some wonderful behaviors. I could even see her brain actually working. We concluded our training session before she got bored. Will try for another short session later and see if she retained anything :)