Ok, there's an element on sarcasm in the title, but Alice and I have been working on the Barbara Hiedenreich dvd we got for Christmas and we finally completed an exercise! True, the dvd commentary says it should have taken 20 min to master, and it's been, well, four months, but that bird can now turn in a circle like a true champ!
Training with Alice is a bit of a nightmare because although she's a lot calmer than she used to be, in a training situation anything that triggers a nervous reaction - a car alarm going off, a raised voice halfway down the street, an owl hooting (it's mating season, it seems the flat is currently beseiged by sexually frustrated tawnys), there are hundreds of them - results in her sitting there with her cheeks fluffed up and no interest in treats or tricks. Add that to me doing this for the first time and it's been, well, challenging to say the least. But we're getting there!
So, any suggestions as to what we can try next? She's good with a target now, and we've cracked turning in a circle, so we need to know what to spend the next four months working on! Er, they'd better not be too complicated...
Training with Alice is a bit of a nightmare because although she's a lot calmer than she used to be, in a training situation anything that triggers a nervous reaction - a car alarm going off, a raised voice halfway down the street, an owl hooting (it's mating season, it seems the flat is currently beseiged by sexually frustrated tawnys), there are hundreds of them - results in her sitting there with her cheeks fluffed up and no interest in treats or tricks. Add that to me doing this for the first time and it's been, well, challenging to say the least. But we're getting there!
So, any suggestions as to what we can try next? She's good with a target now, and we've cracked turning in a circle, so we need to know what to spend the next four months working on! Er, they'd better not be too complicated...