In the meantime

I’m surprised that my last post was in March. We’ve covered some ground since then. We’ve been back at tracking and the practice ‘going nowhere’ in the car helped make her comfortable being left alone in her crate again. Prior to going back to tracking, I completed the Protocol for Relaxation (RP)  (Dr. Karen Overall) at home on her mat. I have been using the mat at the start of tracks to try to get Amika to stop, focus and calm before we hit the track.

An interesting observation from one of the tracking instructors is that Amika’s anxiety goes up when she looses the scent- the longer it takes to reacquire the track, the more excited she is. This accounts for the rocket take-off when she gets it again. It’s the zoomies on the track! I have been working at keeping her closer to the actual track but learning handling skills is challenging on such a fast moving dog. She has slowed down quite a bit though- perhaps because overall anxiety is lower?

A few things that are also going on are better manners when having visitors and when visiting my parents. For visitors, if they are dog tollerant, we leave the crate door open. She mostly stays in there when people come in through the (off limits) front room.  The visitors are instructed to ignore the dog and she does calm much quicker than she used to. At my parents’ she goes straight into the back yard to burn it off and when she is calm and can do the door routine, she comes in and gets ignored for a bit. She still has trouble sleeping there, so is often overtired when we leave.

A big chunk of this improvement is probably due to my anxiety levels dropping and me having more tolerance. That means that I can ignore behaviour that I would usually react to by shouting, grabbing the dog and shoving her somewhere else. Life in general has been happier though I keep letting myself do too much stuff at a time, thus wearing myself out.

I have undergone a ‘burnout relapse’ over the past few weeks, but that is to be expected. I’ve taken time off from training and other stuff and concentrated on doing stuff that I am motivated to do. Yes, Amika was bored, but at least she hasn’t been shouted at when I was trying to train her. The good thing is I’m no longer beating myself up about not training her when I’m in that sort of space because I know boredom is preferrable to abuse!