First weeks
with Vixey have flown by faster than I expected. She is already 3 months old. A
lot has happened since Vixey first came to us and I’m not talking only about
her growing way too fast! But growing she really has done. She is all legs,
ears and teeth right now and weighed a little over 12 lb at 13 weeks! A little
devil running around the house, grabbing plants and shoes and mail while just
passing by. Of course there’s been many great developments too. The most
wonderful one is that Vanilla figured out that I “bought her a new toy”. Every
day she and Vixey play around the house and the yard for hours, making my life
so much easier. While Vanilla is playing the babysitter I can concentrate on
work and other things I neglected for the first two weeks Vixey was around.
After their morning play is done there is several heavenly quiet hours of three
pups snoring around the house! Got to love their cute faces!
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
Training
wise I’ve been trying to be more organized with Vixey than I was with Vanilla.
Well. Obviously I didn’t know as much back then either. Right now one of our
main goals is to extend the time in sit, laying down or standing. I’m using the
clicker pretty much with all of Vixey’s training and it seems to be working really
well. I’ve been also trying to get more and more away from the luring technique
and add more of what’s called free shaping. It’s hard because I’ve done luring
my whole life and I can feel myself being a little impatient sometimes when I
wait for Vixey to figure out what is wanted. It would be SO easy to just show
her and be done with it! On the other hand when she finally does the results
are amazing! Also this will make us achieve the greater goal of Vixey learning
to learn and offer different behaviors herself instead of waiting for me to
show her what to do. I think this will be very helpful later on in everything
else we do. I would love to hear some experiences of this though from people?
Have you tried free shaping and has it been better?
On the
socialization part Vixey has not met quite as many dogs as I’d hope she would’ve
by now. She’s probably met around 15 different dogs and luckily none of the
experiences have been bad. Some have not been very much into her but Vixey’s
been pretty good at respecting them when they tell her to stay off their face. I’m
still looking to finding some playmates for her even though there is a lot less
pressure now that she and Vanilla are such good buddies. On the other hand
Vixey has been traveling and going around with us a ton meeting many different
people. We even did a 5 day trip to San Diego. The 7 hour car drive both ways
went great, she was asleep pretty much the whole time. She loved playing in the
grassy yard all day long and I’m sure coming back to the hot desert was a small
disappointment! Vixey has also been to Apache Lake twice here in Arizona and
last time she already figured out how to swim on her own! And long ways too! At
11 weeks old. I was pretty breath taken. I can’t wait for her to have all her
vaccines so I can take her to our boat in Mexico and introduce her to the
ocean. She has also become quite the mountain climber on our frequent visits to
Mt. Lemmon. She runs after the big dogs as if she was born in a high alpine
pine forest!
My plan for
the next couple of weeks is to increase training a little bit and concentrate
on recall, playing skills and some agility foundation work. She’s really good
with toys with almost a natural fetch and she has a really good release from
anything that’s in her mouth already so I’m hoping to add toys to her reward
selection soon in a more structured manner. I’m so excited to go to our very
first agility foundation training session at the end of the month! I’m sure
Vixey is too since so far she has mainly been watching Vanilla being trained
and she is not very happy with that situation :). Many things to learn before then
though!
Here's a couple photos of Vixey since she was about 9 weeks old to today!
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
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| Photo by Maria Järvinen |
