Baby steps, baby steps

Posted on December 8, 2017 by upwarddogmom

Ziva sits on a sidewalk next to large green painted footprints Just like everyone else, our lives get pretty busy this time of year. I’ve started and never finished so many posts here, always intending to write more often. Usually I start writing when Ziva has settled into her bed, but honestly that can only last for a short period of time and then she’s back up and wants to do something. Anything.

Fortunately, we have a lot of tricks in our bag now, as far as “things Ziva can do.” For example, over Thanksgiving, Ziva and I spent the night at my father’s house. I had hoped she would be pretty chill, given that she spent the entire day playing vigorously with several canine cousins. And she might have been, if there wasn’t also a cat living at my Dad’s house. Earl the cat is a very cool cat. He remained on his perch, and aside from hissing at Ziva a few times, was otherwise not interested in engaging with her at all. Which of course drove Ziva crazy. I tried to distract her with a bully stick, and with a toy, but although she might stop paying attention to the cat for a while, she was still very restless.

That’s when I remembered her nose work, and I asked my brother if he’d help me do a couple of rounds in the living room. We did 4 rounds, with my brother holding Ziva in the hallway and me hiding treats in 3-4 spots around the room. My Dad and brother were amazed at how quickly she sniffed them out each time — she’s good at this! And because she really uses her brain as well as her nose, it was enough to wear her out so that after 4 rounds of this she lay down and went to sleep. No longer interested in the cat, the stairs to the basement, or anything else.

So its really great to have nose work as an option on days when the weather is bad or circumstances mean she can’t really get the physical exercise she needs to get rid of extra energy — for example, my Dad’s yard is not fenced so she has to stay on the leash when we go outside. And despite going on long walks when we’re there, she never really gets “worn out” when we are there. So she is usually restless. Nose work gives her something to do, and exercises her brain if not her body.

I am also trying to take her to more new places. The picture above was taken on a busy street near our house. I realized I had gotten into a rut of taking her on the same predictable neighborhood walk every day. Because I like predictably. But it’s not good for her, because then when we inevitably do go somewhere new, she is still getting used to being calm in new environments. So now, sometimes I change it up and we walk along the busy road in one direction or the other. Sometimes we walk right past the front doors to the 7-11, which can be quite busy at times. She’s really doing very well, I am happy to report. I can still see in her body language that she gets excited at new sights, sounds, and smells, but she keeps it together. She doesn’t pull on the leash, and she doesn’t bark at people. I always take tons of good treats on these walks, and constantly tell her how good she is being and reward her again and again. She turns her head and checks in with me a lot on these “new” walks, and I reward her every time.

In that picture above, she is not looking at me. So that I am not happy about. I would love if her focus was totally on me. But, I was busy with my phone and she “checked out” while I fiddled with taking the picture. But … she stayed in her “sit,” and when I said her name after taking the picture she looked right back at me. So yea, baby steps, baby steps.

We’re really having fun at Rally class, and we have a lot of “moves” to show you soon. She is picking this up so quickly that she’s kind of ahead of me in some ways. Next week we will practice a course in class for the second time, and I’m really excited about it. In life, different dogs like different activities — think about how some dogs love to play fetch, while others are all “meh.” In Rally class, there a few dogs in the class who are clearly just going through the motions because the owners are asking them to do the moves. They are very obedient, but they seem about as excited to chase a food lure from cone to cone as they would be to do a simple “sit” at the vet’s office. Ziva on the other hand, races from cone to cone. When I command “Down!” she throws herself to the ground, front legs splayed out dramatically. It’s like all that energy and excitement she has bottled up finally has a place to go now. She looks me in the eye as if to say, “What next?????”

We’re practicing a long list of moves throughout the day. Before she eats her breakfast I do a few commands — she is very food motivated then! My wife works with her some during the day, and then in the evening I do more after we’ve had some play time. The trickiest thing we’re trying to learn right now is for her to move from sitting in front of me to come around my right side, behind my back, and end up sitting on my left. Mostly difficult because it involves me showing her the food is in my right hand (unlike any other time), and transferring said food from right to left hand behind my back, and rewarding her at my left side.

Because learning in “baby steps” includes me, too!

She’s a Superstar!

Posted on November 16, 2017 by upwarddogmom

Well, maybe Ziva’s not really quite a Superstar yet, but I think she could be. She has really taken to Rally training, and she catches on so quickly to new commands. She is also pretty food-driven which definitely helps. And she is fast, and nimble. She’s a good size for this — the bigger dogs seem to struggle more to do quick turns, and the smaller ones seem harder to lure with food. At 50 lbs and a lotto energy Ziva seems like a natural. I, on the other hand, still struggle with some basic stuff. Like hand eye coordination, or saying things at the right moment. But … I’m getting better, I think.

For the past couple of weeks Ziva has spent the day of class at Doggie Daycare. I drop her off at about 7 am, and then I arrive at around 5 and take her for a little break outside. We walk around the grassy area so she gets a pottie break, and then I give her a small snack and some water at the car. We also practice our leash work for a few minutes, walking back and forth in the parking lot — she’s always pretty excited at this point and it helps her to focus. She loves daycare. She loves the people who work here, and she has some doggie friends in the group so it’s really good socialization. (One of the dogs from Rally class is also in Daycare on these days.) It also gets a lot of energy out of her, so that when it’s Rally Class time, she can focus a bit more easily. Generally speaking , anyway! But she really seems to need that little period of down time to wind down between Daycare and Rally. When we get back inside the building before class, I usually do some CR massage, and that definitely helped last night.

We’ve got a lot to work on in the next couple of weeks. Our next class isn’t until after Thanksgiving, so that’s plenty of time to improve on what we have learned so far. We got a “Perfect” from Tecla, our trainer, last night on our heeling exercise called “find the leg,” but then we learned to expand on it and I flubbed a little. As I said, I’m the one who needs the most practice here. But so far, here’s what we’ve learned and what we’re practicing:

“Find the leg”: the dog is in Sit, the trainer says Heel, steps left leg back, and moves treat in hand around and behind to the left leg, steps left leg forward, and with hand at hip the dogs ends up next to you, and gets the treat at the left hip.
Extended “Find the leg”: Same as above, except the dog gets reward when the trainer’s left leg is still back, then when the left leg is parallel to right, and then when left leg is forward.
Stand: There are 2 versions, one from a moving position and one from a Sit. From moving, you basically put the treat in the dog’s face and take one step back. When the dog steps forward, she stops when her nose bumps into your hand to get the treat you say “Stand” and then “Yes!” From a sit is a little tougher. You still stick the treat in the dog’s face, but this time you move it under their chin, and in their effort to get it they invariably stand up. At this point we just say “Yes!” instead of naming it as Stand. Once we get it down consistently I think then we will be naming it. (Tecla’s really good about training things so that the dog does not get confused, and can progress to the next step easily.)
“Suicide” spins: Anyone who has played any kind of sports in the past 50 years must remember “suicides,” where you race from one cone to another, touch the ground and race back to the first cone. Well, in this exercise, you hold a treat in your hand and lead the dog quickly to the second cone, and then whip your hand around so the dog spins around to get the treat, As soon as she spins you say “Yes!” and give her the treat. Ziva loves this one. (Yeah, she’s that teammate — the one who loves suicides!) And she’s so good at it that Tecla told me I need to go faster, and also further. So Sue’s getting her exercise on this one, for sure!
Modified suicide spins: This time you do sets of 4, and randomly in that set you wait till the dog completes the spin and then command “Sit.” You have to mix it up so they don’t anticipate it coming say, on the third time. (Because they totally will.) You then also do this exercise with Down.
Focus when moving: She also really likes this one, and I am trying to harness that enthusiasm. She can be a little snappy for the treat in this exercise, which I asked Tecla about last night. The snappiness means she is very driven, so I don’t want to diminish that drive. But, to be honest, it can really hurt sometimes! The advice was to get a thin, sturdy glove — like a golf glove, or a wide receiver glove — and try not to pull my hand back when I’ve giving her the treat. I’m sure I am pulling back sometimes in anticipation, but that’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ziva’s doing pretty well with this one, and has improved from the start when she used to jump up. So I’m confident we get this under control. It’s another example of me learning what I need to do. Which, let’s be honest, is about 90% of dog obedience training.
Trainer walks around: Put the dog in Sit, transfer leash to left hand, and walk around the dog (leading with right foot). Dog should stay seated, trainer stands to right of dog and gives reward. Also do this with Down.

So. If you wonder how we get to this, it’s a lot of work, but totally worth it:

In our next class, we’ll get to try doing an actual Rally course — that should be interesting! I have a feeling Ziva will once again do great, and I am the one who will be flubbing it up. I just googled “Rally novice signs” and it turns out that this is, like, a whole “thing”: You can even buy Rally course signs on etsy: rally novice signs. Watching videos on Rally, I always wondered how people understoodd so well what they are supposed to be doing with those turns and spins, and it seems that people buy these signs and study them. It’s always amazing to me how many things there are in the world that have their own culture and following.

Maybe Ziva has found her place.

Sweetest Devotion

Posted on November 11, 2017 by upwarddogmom

Do you know what the title of this post represents, I mean, other than of course my undying love for this furry beast? It’s also the title of one of the few songs that help Ziva calm down when we’re in the car. So yeah, Ziva has her own playlist, and it’s very heavy on Adele. “Sweetest Devotion” starts playing and Ziva stops whining and puts her head on the arm rest. I can sometimes get her to expand her tastes to a little Amy Winehouse — “Valerie” has a nice melody. And I recently added Tash Sultana’s “Jungle,” and she seems to enjoy that one a lot. But mostly, it’s “Hello” on an endless loop.

We have been traveling with Ziva in a crate in the back of the SUV for many months because, if you have read the early days of this blog you will remember, a year ago she would be so wound up and excited in the car that it was impossible to drive. She would spin herself around on her seatbelt leash and practically choke herself, or, she would stand with her mouth at my right ear and bark, and bark, and bark. Good times.

But recently we had to take the crate out of the car in order to move some furniture, and I thought I would give it a try with Ziva in that back seat again. We’ve done a few short trips since then and she has done pretty well. She still gets excited, but it’s nowhere near the previous level. And if she sees a dog out the window, she still barks, but she is able to get calm again — a year ago that was not happening. A year ago she would just continue to wind herself up. And up. And up. I thank Conditioned Relaxation behavior modification for this change (and of course the wonderful trainers we have worked with for the past year!). Ziva has always loved to go for a car ride — in fact it’s the only way we were able to catch her the couple of times that she escaped the yard. (The fencing has been repaired!). She ran around the neighborhood at the speed of light, and there was no way we could grab her, or get her to come to us. But drive up in the car, fling the door open and say “Wanna go for a ride?????” And she would hop right in. She likes to sit and look out the window, and she doesn’t really like to sit in the crate. So I am glad that it seems like we can move her back to the back seat and keep working on her being calm. Adele is fine with me. The Enya was a little much.

Anyway, its been longer between posts than I intended. But as I’ve mentioned before: when life gets busy and it’s a matter of writing about the dog or spending time with the dog, no offense but she comes first. Right now, it’s Saturday morning and we are back home after a successful time at Pack to Basics and Behavior Modification classes. Ziva did really, really well, and is now enjoying a well earned nap:

Ziva sleeps, resting her head by a laptop

I just want to tell you how great she did this morning. We haven’t been to either of these classes in a few weeks, and there were a couple of new high energy dogs today. One in particular was a challenge to Ziva because it has so much energy. She’s a small Lab mix named Oreo, and boy does she remind me of Ziva 12 months ago! During Pack to Basics she and Ziva got a little too close for each other’s comfort and both made some ugly noises, but it was easily dispersed and they didn’t pay each other any mind after that. But what really amazed me was during the Behavior Mod class. We did “doggy yoga” to start, and we ended up being just a few feet away from Oreo. The way this “yoga” works, is that the dogs have to face away from the other dogs (i.e., their back is to the other dogs), and they have to remain calm. We started out with Ziva sitting to my left, and Oreo about 5 feet behind us. Oreo had a really hard time sitting, and she definitely did not want to sit to the left of her mom. She whined, and she kept getting up. Her mom kept putting her back in sit, and she kept getting up. My heart went out to that mom. It’s so hard to stay calm and keep putting the dog back into a “sit,” over and over again.

And do you know what Ziva did? NOTHING! oh my freaking god. She sat and she looked at me, and sometimes she turned her head and looked at Oreo, and then I would do bridging (“That’s a dog, dih dih dih dih, Yes!”), and she would return her focus to me and lose interest in Oreo, who was still whining and constantly getting up.

It was so incredible, that later, when we left the building, I saw Oreo’s mom and I told her “Hang in there — it really does get better! A year ago, this one was just like that!” And she seemed amazed and said “Really? Because there are just some days ….” And I replied “Oh, I know! Believe me, I know — all that energy!” I also told her that Ziva definitely still has her moments but ….

See, when you have a reactive dog, or a dog that is adrenalized so they are almost uncontrollable, it can be so emotionally difficult. You constantly feel that other people are judging you. It can be a vicious cycle, where the dog misbehaves in public and you get nervous and upset, so then you go out in public and the dog senses that you’re nervous and upset so they become nervous and upset. And misbehave. So it takes a lot of work to just keep going, and taking the dog for a walk even if strangers are looking at you spraying vinegar on your dog’s nose while it barks at another dog across the street. Or you’re standing on her leash while she’s in a behavioral down and still whining at the dog over there. It doesn’t look like you are doing anything, but of course you are doing exactly what the trainer has taught you. And over time it works!

I clearly remember in the early days when some of the other dog parents would say to me “She’s doing so much better!” (Shout out to Bruno’s mom, who always said encouraging things, even when Ziva was being far from perfect.) I feel lucky to have found a community where there is so much support. It is a place where Ziva clearly feels safe — and so do I! And that means we both feel confident to push ourselves. For us, that can mean just going for a hike in the woods, knowing it is quite possible we will encounter another dog. That may seem like a tiny challenge, but trust me, its enough to keep many an owner and dog at home. And that’s a shame. Because, this:

Ziva sits on a hike in the woods

The backstory …

Posted on May 14, 2017 by upwarddogmom

Ziva sitting on the back step of our house If I’d had any idea what I was in for, I would have started this blog about six months ago, when Ziva first joined our family. But I didn’t, and so now I have to catch you up on how we got to where we are today. When we adopted Ziva, we knew she was young, energetic, part German Shepherd, and very friendly but a little dog reactive. She had been pulled from a shelter in North Carolina 24 hours before she was scheduled to be euthanized, and had been living with a terrific foster family for a couple of weeks. Sounded like a bit of a handful, but we were experienced dog owners, so no big deal. Right?

Eh, wrong! She turned out to be kind of a big deal. We collected Ziva from her foster mom at the vet’s after she had been spayed, so she was a little subdued. She pretty much slept the entire ride of about an hour home. She entered the house wearing the cone of shame, and our two cats came right up to her, thinking perhaps she was dear, sweet, 13-year old Fritz, our dog who had passed away a few months earlier. She didn’t react to the cats at all, and we spent a pretty calm night.

Then I went off to work the next morning and things got real. My wife spent the day trying to calm Ziva, who paced and whined and barked and climbed onto the radiator. She tried to give her some exercise, but with fresh stitches from her spay, Ziva was on “light duty for a week.” Light duty. hahahahahahaha.

Instead of getting better, each day got more stressful for us all in those early days. I took a few days off from work, because Ziva couldn’t be left alone at all, and even when you were there with her it was impossible to get anything done. She was velcro-ed to your side. She went willingly into her crate, but if left alone she barked and clawed at the crate door, and even bit the door so hard she bent the wires. Even after her stitches were out, we could never wear her out. She loved to chase a ball, and we spent hours in the backyard trying to make her tired. She might stop for a few minutes, panting and tongue hanging out — only to race around the yard at lightning speed again. But she never wanted to be alone. She got so upset that she seemed panicked, frantic. We put up baby gates so that she could have more space but stay out of trouble, hoping that would help her relax more than being confined in the crate. But if we both left the house, she barked and barked and barked. And when we returned, she raced around the room, barked, and flung herself against the baby gate. It was kind of a zoo. (The cats hid.)

Ziva lies in the grass with an orange tennis ball in front of her We had always planned to sign up for obedience classes, but clearly we needed some help asap. Thus we began with our first trainer. We needed someone good, and we needed them fast. I did a little research and found a very highly rated trainer who lived right in our neighborhood. Her methods were completely positive training, and seeing that Ziva definitely had some underlying fears or issues that were causing her to be so wound up, we thought that would be perfect for her. And indeed it was a very good start. Several private lessons with this trainer helped us work on some basic things like “leave it” and “stay,” with the idea that we would gradually be able to walk further away and even out the front door and she would remain calm. It was very slow, but steady progress addressing Ziva’s separation anxiety.

Then we went for a walk.

The other thing I forgot to mention, is that although Ziva clearly had a loving home in her first year, where she was house-trained and taught some basic commands like “sit,” walking on a leash did not seem to have been something she had ever learned. Because the moment we put a leash on her, she bolted ahead, yanking my arm practically out of its socket. Combine that with seeing another dog across the street, and she was uncontrollable. We were using a “no pull” harness in those days, but she missed the message on that “no pull” part. Even getting the harness on Ziva was an ordeal — it was like putting a saddle on a mustang. A wriggling, mouthy mustang.

All of this time, we were using purely positive training: never saying “no” or giving any corrections, just lots of redirecting and lots of treats to reinforce the good behavior. Throughout all of these challenges, Ziva’s potential shone through. But she seemed to only have 2 speeds: 0 or 11, on a scale of 1 to ten. She just could not seem to ever be “calm.” And when she saw other dogs, her reactiveness seemed to be getting worse. The trainer tried walking with her on our street and only got about 50 feet from the front door before Ziva saw another dog and went out of her mind. It was all the trainer could do to hold her back. (In case you haven’t met Ziva, she is 48 pounds of pure muscle.) She said Ziva would not be able to be in her group obedience class until she was able to be around other dogs, and advised we just keep trying to desensitize her by having her get used to being around dogs and getting lots of high value treats.

There were no treats high value enough for what we were going through.

But Ziva had shown us that she could get along with other dogs: although she initially barked frantically through the pickets at sweet Aussie next door, she soon began wagging her tail whenever she saw her, and clearly enjoyed her company. But encountering new dogs when walking her sent her out of her mind. Chicken, cheese, bison jerky, hot dog — she showed no interest but instead barked and pulled and jumped. I started to dread walking her, and instead took her places where I knew we would not see other dogs. All the time thinking, “Is this just how she’s going to be for the rest of her life????”

But at night when she had finally exhausted herself and put her head in my lap, or when she hopped on the sofa next to me and gave me sloppy kisses, I just knew we had to figure out what was going on with her. I couldn’t imagine returning her to the rescue group, but she was exhausting us all, and something needed to change. It was time to find help from someone who knew German Shepherds, who knew reactive dogs … and who knew Ziva. So I contacted the rescue group where we got her, All Shepherd Rescue, and explained the situation. I cannot say enough good things about the folks at ASR — they were wonderful in responding quickly to find out more about what exactly was going on, and the give us some recommendations for trainers who specialize in these types of issues.

I’ll give you a break from reading now (and me a break from writing!), and tell you more about what happened in the next post. Thanks for sticking with us — I hope you’ll find this interesting once I get into the behavior modification techniques and methods that have really been life-changing for us. I know there are many different opinions on training methods, and I welcome your thoughts. What we are doing is working: it’s 10 am and Ziva is sleeping soundly on the couch while I write.

We’ve come a very long way.

Ziva and Sue sit on the backporch. Ziva's tongue is wagging.