Real Improvement!

Wow...my dog is getting better. I was honestly scared that I'd never say that. He still confuses the heck out of me, but he's honestly, genuinely, getting better.

Our reactive dog class today was another indoor class, and two of the four dogs in our class were absent this week. We decided it wouldn't work for us to do exposure work with those two dogs, since by some lovely coincidence we had the two most explosive dogs in the class, so we set up the room so that we had full barriers between our dogs, and a corridor of barriers on the other side of the room, so my boss and her dog could come in and we could work with controlled exposure once everyone was settled in.

Caspian is still acting bizarrely during classes. He started out eating off the floor, but not from my hand. This was the same thing we saw last week. But, here's the weird part: after we did the exposure to Lyra, my boss' dog, he would take treats from my hand, but not off the floor. Well, once he was taking treats again. Go figure.

Anyway, class started with clicking and treating anything that wasn't aggressive. We did pretty well. His bite was really uninhibited, so it worked nicely that he was taking treats better off the floor. We even managed to do some movement work, though I lost him pretty quickly. This wasn't a big surprise - a lot of the outside work he and I have done has been with me standing up, but all of our classroom work recently has been with me on the floor beside him. Still, we did some work with u-turns. Of the six we tried, two went okay, two went perfectly, and in the last two, I lost him.

Back to the floor, with some massage work. He really likes to have his back and neck scratched, so we've been using that a lot as an available non-food reward. He wasn't exactly relaxed, but again we saw some nice sleepy eyes, and some mild, non-stressed sniffing in the direction of the other dog enrolled in the class - we couldn't see her behind the barriers, but we could hear her and he could obviously smell her.

We decided to actually make an attempt at letting him see another dog, since he'd been doing so well, and so we moved the barriers about two feet apart. Lyra and my boss had already been doing heelwork back and forth behind the barriers, and Caspian already knew they were there, so getting to see them briefly was the logical next step. And, amazingly, there was no explosion.

Caspian was very focused on Lyra, and wouldn't take treats or respond to the clicker. But I could see him thinking, at least - his muscles bunched, like they would before an explosion, but that was all. He didn't bark or growl, or even shift his weight. I clicked and did a lot of petting and scratching. The first two times I cheated a little, and started the praise and scratches before Lyra came into view. The third, I used it as a real reward, hands off until he looked at her quietly.

He wouldn't eat treats for the next 5 or so minutes, so we did a lot of massage, and I gave him a bone that he held onto, but didn't chew on. We even made it out of the classroom without as much pulling as we usually see, which was a very pleasant surprise.

So, yay. He's still got a long way to go before he's anywhere near normal dog behavior, around strange dogs. But in the last two weeks, we've made more progress than we have made in his three years of life. I'm stunned, and thrilled. And slightly puzzled. :) But believe me, I'm not complaining!