Bailey's Progress Report

Watching Dogs 101


Potty Training

Bailey only did OK this week. On Sunday, she had 2 "accidents". The first time, Josh was playing with her literally 15 minutes after she came in from a walk. She just stopped playing and squatted right in front of us. She definitely knows better and she didn't even have to pee. It was just a tiny dribble. We took her out to correct her and she just sniffed forever. The second was very similar. she had gone almost 2 weeks without an accident and she has 2 in one day. We're trying to make some connections to figure out what's causing this. One thing we have noticed is that her accidents are always either on the weekends (when we're home during the day) or when she's in an unfamiliar environment (either at a new place or we have visitors at our place). 

I did finally finish the poochie bells. We're using them, but Bailey hasn't quite figured them out yet. We sit her in front of them and make her hit them with her paw, then we treat her and say "outside". She'll catch on eventually :-)

Bailey's Victims

This is the worse one yet. Remember when I said she hadn't really done any damage to the house? (Except the vinyl we're replacing anyway? Well...not anymore. See the evidence below.

She is very used to being home alone during the day and she's never done anything like this. This is the first time she's been left alone without her bone. This happened on Wednesday. I came home and there was chewed up wood all in her crate (I didn't think to get a picture of that). It took me forever to figure out where it came from. This is Bailey in time out.

Don't worry...this week hasn't been all bad.

Training

Last week, we had just introduced "shake". This is the first step to teaching her to wave and do several other tricks that involve her paws. She picked up shake very quickly and she knows the verbal command now! A few days after we realized the understood the verbal command, we started on "wave". It was tough at first, because she would try to switch between paws. Eventually, she got it. She's doing very well now. She is rarely putting her paw down between waves so it looks really good. She still tries to switch between paws when she's very excited. Sometimes she appears to be bored with this one, but she doesn't know the voice command yet. Her voice command is "Say Hi" (I'm more of a "hey" person than "hi"...but hi rhymes with bye, so we will be able to use either of them). After doing a bit of research, I found this video on YouTube. This is exactly how I taught Bailey and I was amazed at how quickly she picked it up! I think she actually does it better than the dog in the video since she doesn't do that weird jumpy thing the other dog does :-). We've got a long way to go, but she's doing so well!

We've decided to switch Bailey's food again. There were a few things I wasn't completely happy with in her old food (Blue Buffalo) and I found a better food for the same price (Taste of the Wild). They had several flavors and they sent me 2 samples of each. We narrowed them down based on calories. Since she's still very active, we wanted to choose one of the 2 higher calorie recipes. I didn't have a preference between these, so I decided to let Bailey choose. I made her choose 3 times and I switched the sides the foods were on each time...she kept going to the same one :-) I let her choose between Wetlands and High Prarie. She chose High Prarie.