I took Bing to the vet today and tried to do a few touches. He was so scared, poor guy! He did touch a couple of times but then ran back into the crate. Although, he DID eat his pellets, so he must not have been too freaked out. Tomorrow I will try again.
Once again, Bing is a lot calmer then Mr. Darcy, so I use Bing as my test chin to gain a little experience and to see how things go with him first
Bing did well tonight, I am starting to pull my hand away for stay, sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't. But I think that is how he will learn what it means. I think I might try and start introducing the word 'kennel' again since that is going much better then before.
Mr. Darcy has 'touch' pretty much down now. I am starting to add the verbal to the hand signal. the crate training is going at a good pace. I have notice that he has developed a supersitcious behavior of turning around in a circle in his crate as this happened when I closed the gate and picked it up ready to put him back into the cage. He just kept turning around and around in circles. Really cute, but not exactly what I want!
Darcy is being rather strange lately... sometimes he will get into these moments where he just freezes and virtually nothing I do will snap him out of it. He has to snap himself out of it. I think it is because he is afraid... but I don't know what I am doing to get him afraid. Maybe it is a sound or something...? I don't know!
Like it will happen randomly during a training session. Everything will be going fine and then he just freezes up on me. I either try to be patient and wait for it to pass, lure him out of it with a treat, click for any movement, or if I get too frustrated I just leave the room and try again a few minutes later because sometimes none of those do anything.
This happened about 3 times today, as well as twice yesterday. I did manage to leave the last training session on a positive note, which is good. But this feezing of his really concerns me. I will try to be even more observant and see what might be causing this.
Maybe I should try the trick of rewarding this behavior? Hmmm, thats an idea, but I think I will try everything else first... mainly trying to figure out why.
