Maggie's Training

[Stacy]

Maggie's trainer came back today and he was very impressed with how much improvement he saw. Go us! I also see improvement in her confidence, but I think being with her every day it's harder for me to see the changes. But I did notice when she got in bed with me a couple times last night! 

We are going to continue to work on crate training. I like his style. Now that she happily goes in and out of the crate for treats we are going to work on shutting the door for about 5 minutes at a time while throwing treats in. We will slowly increase the time that she's in there and work on being out of sight for short periods of time as well. Eventually the crate should become her safe spot and hopefully will solve the potty problems that we're having. The crate is sort of the key thing to address the other issues.

We're also going to work on going for daily field trips and letting strangers give her treats. We are going to slowly and carefully introduce her to the world. He also thought that our group training class is a good idea as long as we go into it with the idea that we might not learn anything, but that it will still benefit her to be out in a new place with people and other dogs (dogs are not her problem, she loves dogs!) 

Katie was in her crate working on a Kong while we were working with Maggie and at the end we let her out, and he said that Katie makes a huge difference in Maggie's confidence and that she's learning so much good stuff from her. What good sweet girls I have. It's really so rewarding to do the work to transform Maggie's life into the one that she always should have had.

[Stacy]

I think I did. I'm hoping for some good progress. We are supposed to go on vacation at the end of June and I worked really hard to find a very dog friendly resort so the girls can go. It will be really difficult if I can't crate her. Even though I plan to include them in the fun there are still places where dogs can't go, but I don't want to leave them home for a week! That would be no fun at all.

[Maryann,Roo and Tigger]

Yeah!  Keep it up!  Look forward and don't let a bad hour or day get you down.