(no subject)

One of the strangest things about any deliberate bond with an animal is the choice to change the rest of your life. Its like jumping into a hole you can never climb out of, something with an unseen bottom. As much as any training and general pack bonding molds them, it also demands accommodation from you from whoever they are, and you can't know that until you're already inside it.

Obviously things with Robs are changing day to day, segment of the day to segment of the day. His first day he was just overwhelmed. Then his main concern mostly has been how to get what he wants; when I'm an impediment or an object to be manipulated he tried to figure out how to do it. When we're out in the big world of the farm he's still mostly like that, but in the mornings when he's more settled and sometimes during walks or training he's starting to also want affection for its own sake.

What he does not have is me as an object of attention or focus when other things are going on. If you don't have a dog, an example is: when something weird happens that my pups don't know how to deal with, they generally look at me first with a quick glance to see how I'm handling it and what I want. When they start doing this, modeling behaviour, like calm around cats, becomes a lot easier. This attention can be trained in. With Avallu it was already trained, Solly has always been ultra people-centered and had it innately, and with Thea I trained it in when she was very young.

It's weird for me to think of a dog being so old, is he seven months? Sept 15? Oct 15? And not having the kind of bond with his owner where he's watching to check what they're like. A good dog (?) will read mood and make decisions about how to ask for something, and sometimes whether to ask for something, based on that. It's like offering snuggles vs play when they want to interact, depending on whether I'm sad or energetic. Reading the room is also a great and important livestock guardian dog skill for moving around animals withotu spooking them. He is awful at that right now: the geese clear his quarter of the field when we're on walks on leash. So do the cats.

Robs has very very quickly learned to offer "sit" when he wants something, and though we're still generalizing it out into more situations it was my solution to him jumping up as a main or first communication tool. If I were able-bodied I'd be easier with teaching him to pay attention because just acting ultra weird is the most fun way for them. At the moment what I probably need to be doing is just treating him when he looks at me in response to his name or when we're on leash at all.

He is very very food motivated.

(no subject)

Oh, the actual thing I was starting the previous post to describe is: last night finally we sat out in the front yard for an hour, about 50 feet away from Thea on a mound, and started to model guarding. There's a noise, someone looks at something or barks at something, I say "what'cha got?" (I don't know, it's just become that over the years) and look at it and sometimes we get up to get a better look and evaluate it. It migh be a cat in the next field, a car coming around the corner, a duck walking into view. Then I model reacting appopriately and tell pup he's good for noticing. Sometimes it's like looking for a minute and saying "good being calm, it's just a duck" or "you're a doofus, it's just a cat" and sometimes it's growling or just watching intently until something passes and saying "thank you, you're right"

Obviously this will work better when he pays more attention to how I react, but it's how the thing is done.

I'm between a side road and the highway, and i can hear both the vehicles on the highway and on the side road as they turn off the highway, before they come past. Thea generally barks or attends closely to the cars on our road, but the highway is about 600ft away past some trees and she ignores vehicles on it even though they can be heard. Robs has not yet learned to distinguish, so though he watched Thea track the cars on my road and picked it up quickly, he also barked or attended to the cars on the highway which was hilarious for all of is (he really wants her approval, and it'll go so much easier when they can be alone together without me holding a leash) (he does good barking mostly, a couple signaling barks and not a ton of repeated over-stimulated ones. Mostly)

Anyhow, that hour felt like the first bits of me really creating the shared world we'll inhabit.

Thea is doing great with him, holding boundaries which he mostly respects and coming along on walks when she's feelingn it (when it's cool out) and not when she's not. Solly is doing amazing given that I'm now asking her to go to her... well, chosen spot, which is under my pottery bench and she pretends it's her crate... and then quick-walking Robs through that room to the bedroom. She also has to walk past his run area in the carport to get out for her walks. So they've got this quick seperated exposure and she's not super pleased about it but is accepting it and I think getting a bit better incrementally.

He really is being good with the ducks, he'll try to chase once in awhile when he's doing a tantrum/attention seekig/bored sort of thing but in the normal walking round etc he'll mostly ignore them. He's much less good with cats outdoors, and that's why he's not offleash in the front yard around Thea.

He knows to keep his teeth off me but still tests a running in and lunging single nip to try and get me to chase him. It hasn't been working, and jumping up on me doesn't work, so last night he once tried leaping straight up into the air, his feet were about four feet off th ground, just up and down in a normal horizontal standing position. He did that a couple times and I wish I was a proper trainer who could capture that behaviour and put it on a command because it was very impressive. The dogs all have an "attention please" communication that they can use to get my attention when they want it and I'll drop what I'm doing and give it: Solly does eyemelting stares, Thea chases her tail. Jumping straight up and down would be great.