Brain Fart!

Okay so I have had a huge training brain fart. I have to admit, here lately, most of my time has been spent on Miller and his PT. I figured that Deuce needed some time to grow up anyway and didn't need the intense training sessions. I guess I was wrong! He is going through yet another stubborn phase it seems where i give a command and he just looks at me like "Yeah right!". The other day, Victoria Stillwell was on animal planet and she was having a puppy doing puppy push-ups and I tried to get Deuce to do puppy push ups too and he couldn't do them. He specifically had problems going from down back up to sit. I have worked really, really hard on getting him to do any command by shaping the command and then knowing the command without any physical cue other than my voice. I sometimes have to do some luring but i try to work off of shaping as much as possible. I found that if I lured him up from the down with either a here command (touch my hand with your nose) or pulled my hand up in an upwards sweeping motion, he would come up, but if I simply said sit, he would either just lay there and do nothing or start offering tricks. At first I tried everything to get him to come up but nothing was working so had to get my clicker and take him to a quiet place where it was just him and I and basically patiently wait him out. He eventually started offering a sit from the down but it takes quite a while to get there. I am still getting lots of back talk and offering of other behaviors before the sit. I am hoping to really work this all this week to try and get this issue resolved. This could be a huge problem as I have trained an automatic down on the table and if it is a sit in AKC and he refuses to come up, we could have occur some faults or even a DQ.

Another issue we have run into involves harley and not Deuce but harley doesn't have his own blog so I am going to talk about it here. Harley has become a huge counter surfer and it is becoming a big problem. I walked back in the house the other day as I had forgotten something and he had a stack of cookies that tony had bought at a bake sale in his mouth. Luckily these were just peanut butter cookies, no chocolate, but still, he should no better. I have toyed with the idea of crating Harley forever and it may come to fruition now for sure. I can't have him counter surfing all the time as I sometimes forget and leave stuff out and don't want him to ingest something he shouldn't. The problem is, I need yet another wire crate. I think our house is full of them for sure but what doggy house isn't ? I am looking to downsize Deuce's crate anyway as I don't think he needs his litter box anymore so Harley may be moving in to Deuce's crate and Deuce may be getting a new downstairs crate. I really want to keep his upstairs kennel where it is because we have a routine involving it and I don't want to change it. I get up and feed when tony's alarm goes off at 5:20 and then we all go back to bed. I have found that deuce likes to go into his crate at that point and chew on a chewie so I use it for that purpose. I don't think he would like to be downstairs while the rest of us are upstairs and he doesn't always settle back down after he is fed. I like getting a couple more hours of sleep in so don't want to change our routine. Crates go on sale at Tractor supply next weekend so may have to invest in yet another crate and of course another kong and a case of peanut butter LOL!