We’ve been doing a lot with little Alice these past few days! Mostly in terms of exposing her to daily life noises and such like knocking on doors, fireworks CD, and thunder CD—but only when she’s had plenty of downtime in between and she indicates she’s ready.
After loading the clicker, I’ve also been training her to look at me when I say her name. I’ve only done a couple of training sessions so far with it, but she’s very reliably looking at me when I say her name now! She’s doing great!
Today we introduced going up and down small steps while Hestia worked on mild separation anxiety in her crate. We had noticed Alice was hesitant to do things like get down off of our laps or step off of a small platform. So I started on the wheelchair ramp to the back yard.
I sat sideways on the ramp and encouraged her with treats to climb on and off the side of the ramp. She did pretty well for her first time! She climbed up pretty far, but going down was harder for her.
Funnily enough, she figured out pretty quickly that if I was holding a treat down the little step that she could walk down the ramp, hop off where it was lower, and then come get the treat. I rewarded that, too, because I like to reward thinking outside of the box!
Brad got video of our training session, and a few pictures, too. They are below. In them, Alice is a tiny sable and white Chin puppy, and I am a woman with long brown wavy hair wearing a colorful mermaid dress.
