Mike’s Doghouse

The “put the bone on the nose” trick didn’t work. It may someday but neither of us (me and Mike) are interested in pursuing it. So what we will work on is “Where’s your tail?” Basically, it is getting him to go in a circle. He’ll do this already. I need to fine tune it some and tack on the cue. I think this will be funny as heck since he has a nub.

Teaching Joella her main trick was easy since all I had to do was add a cue to something she already did. She does a “Dead bug” where she lays on her back. She sleeps in that position a lot, too. So all I had to do was say “Do the Dead Bug” and she’d roll over. Mike doesn’t have anything he does like that. I’ve been watching him, trying to come up with something but, nope. The only thing he does really well is when he is focused and sitting, he sits so far upright, it looks as if you could knock him backwards by touching his nose. Of course, you can’t, but that’s how upright he sits. I looked at that from all angles and couldn’t come up with something to make it into. Basically, its a SIT and nothing more.

Meanwhile, Mike knows DOWN finally. We are working on OFF. He’ll do a WAIT for a long time. He put himself in his SPOT the other day. I praised like mad but his attention was on his food bowl up on the counter. House training is still going. He came to me tonight (Lorna must’ve forgotten to latch his crate). I petted him and finished what I was doing but by then it was too late. He’d made a mess in the kitchen. I let him out the back door while I cleaned it up. He did tell me, though. I thought maybe he was just saying “My door was unlatched!” but now I know better. He’ll go into his crate when Lorna opens the gate to the bedroom and says “Time for bed”. If he is full of himself, he’ll still be running around but if he is ready, he goes right into his box. We still have the small crate in the bedroom for him and the Big Boy Box in the living room. That’s where he stays when we go out.

I also just updated the command/cue list. It is in a spreadsheet in two different formats:

Commands.ods (OpenOffice spreadsheet)
Commands-xls.xls (Microsoft Excel)