31 May, 2011

On Sid’s Brilliance and Dog Envy

This started out as a comment in response to Sharon Wachsler (of After Gadget) on my last post, but it started getting really really long so I thought I’d just make it a post.

I should probably just get it out of the way that I am tickled to death that Sharon is reading, I used to pop into After Gadget before coming to terms with the fact that my chronic pain wasn’t going to get better because dog training! and it definitely went in my feed reader when I made the decision to partner with a service dog and realized I would have to train my own dog because service dog training! Plus her comments are further evidence that my blog is read by people who are not, in fact, related to me (hi Dad!) which is pretty cool, let me tell you.

Anyway, what Sharon said that started this whole line of thinking off was

Wow! Doing so well at such a young age! I thought GSDs tended to mature slowly, as is true for bouviers and a lot of the other large, herding breeds.
Can’t say I’m not jealous, though trying not to be. (Recently talked to Barnum’s breeder, who told me his litter had been particularly slow to mature. Makes me feel better — it’s not just me/us!)
However, he has magically gotten calmer, more food- and work-motivated once the testosterone pump was turned off, if you catch my drift. ;-)

I feel I have to start out with a disclaimer: I’m not sure I would have posted it if I’d made that training/assessment run and Sid had been a total dork-faced scatterbrain the whole time. I would have needed a lot of time to process the fears it would raise in me of having to wash him out, and time to get over feeling like a bad trainer, and all the other inevitable anxieties that arise when our dogs turn out to be fallible beings instead of the perfect angels we’d like them to be. And Sid carries the weight of some extra baggage: not only is he a Service Dog In Progress but I am not kidding when I tell you I have loved him since he was 2 weeks old, when I cradled him in my hands and he went “grrrrrwoof!” at me amid his infant puppy dreams.

So not only do you have the usual worries, but if I have to wash him out, he cannot stay, or I have to adjust my meds or stick with a cane or something. We don’t have the space, time, or finances for five dogs in the house, four pets plus a service dog. We just don’t. And a cane is not terribly ideal for me and I don’t feel 100% safe using one, because I have to develop a compensatory lean to make sure I don’t wobble away from the cane and fall over. And let me just keep dragging Sharon into this, because she wrote a couple really good posts on the issues she was having with her SDIT, Barnum, and the heartbreak that goes along with these considerations. Those posts hit a couple different nerves with me. Part One is here, Part Two is here, and here’s Part Three.

So anyway, if I had taken Sid out and he had seriously scared me about his ability to handle what I need from him as a service dog, I probably would not have written about it for a good long time. Because there is so much hanging on his ability to service dog for me.

But yeah, I am proud to say that Siddy is performing at an unprecedented level for a dog as young as he is, who is as new to public access work as he is. Stupid fatigue and pain keeping me from taking him out all the time, but anyhoo.

I can’t claim this is entirely due to me as a trainer. GSDs are slow to mature, and but I have some advantages with Sid:

1) He has a good “off switch.” I’m not sure if you can train this, I’ve never had to try. Beowulf has a great off switch. Tink’s off switch sucks. But a good off switch, or the ability to just lie around and zone out, is essential because a lot of what I need a service dog to do is lie around and zone out. Or at least lie quietly and watch the world go by. Sid is happy to do this as long as the world is busy enough to hold his interest.

Really, Sid is just good rough material in the first place. He comes from a long line of dogs who were selected not just for their willingness to work with people, but their desire to work with people, which is an important distinction. This can make a real difference, and it stacks the deck in my favor because I’m not trying to constantly convince Siddy that it’s worth his time to work with me; working with me is what he wants to do.

2) I’ve spent a lot of time reinforcing that “off switch” and the “lying quietly” behavior. There’s a bed under my craft table, if we’re in my room and I’m busy then I direct Sid to the bed and pause periodically to ruffle his ears, feed him a piece of cheese, or hand him a good toy. He gets a lot of reinforcement for just lying quietly.

Which is one of those things that I kind of figured out on my own, actually. You can find a lot of resources out there on training your own service dog, but they all focus on task training and how to break down tasks. None of the ones I saw said “Figure out not only what tasks you need, but what your dog will actually be doing when you’re out with him.” Working Beowulf at school proved to me definitively that I needed to teach Sid to be OK with just lying around.

All of this is not to say that Sid does not have moments when I kind of despair that he will ever be grown up enough for me to trust him 100% with my well-being. He’s still a puppy, and while he can straighten up and focus and fly right, sometimes his natural dorkishness gets the better of him. And I don’t want to train all of that out of him, I love his big dorky grin and the way he rolls onto his back and flails around with his eyes wild and his tongue lolling out. My job at the moment is to teach him to save the dorkface for times when it’s appropriate, and expand his ability to focus.

And, y’know, envy is all over the dog world. While Sharon is jealous of Sid’s ability to just chill, I was reading this post with a list of things Barnum is working on and feeling like a serious slacker trainer with an under-educated SDIT. It’s too bad, in a lot of ways, that owner-trainers can’t do week-long “dog exchanges”; I think we’d all feel a lot better about our own dogs and ourselves as trainers if we could do periodic “trade-offs”!

30 May, 2011

Service Dog In Progress

We took Sid out on a training run yesterday. Well, less a training run than a chance for me to get a feel for where he’s at in public access skills, so I know where we need work.

The first stop was Panera, to get a reading on where we’re at for restaurants. We picked an odd time and chose Panera because they have handy outdoor seating, plus the food was paid for when we sat down to eat, so if Sid had been a huge dork, we could have picked up and left no problem. He actually did very well until a sparrow decided to check him out, which got him a little excited. I’m not sure what that tiny bird was thinking, hopping to about 2 feet away from Siddy, but Sid at least was not uncontrollable. He just really wanted to try and bite that bird. In a lot of ways it would have been easier on him for us to eat inside, because outside you had a lot of distractions: small suicidal birds, human passers-by, traffic noises. But on the other hand I wasn’t at all sure that he’d be well-behaved enough for inside, so better to sit outside for my mental health.

The next stop was Borders, where the only problem was that Sid was starting to lose focus about halfway through our time there. I suspect it was because a book store is a pretty damn boring place for a young dog, and my browsing style in bookstores involves a lot of slowly creeping along shelves and then standing, sometimes crouching — in other words, not a lot for him to do but stand around. So it’s not surprising, given that he’s 10 months old, that his attention kind of wandered and also he forgot where his butt was and knocked into shelves once or twice. I think he’d have done better if Borders were more of a high-distraction environment, actually, because he does quite well with just standing around watching the world go by, as long as the world is, in fact, going by.

The final stop was PetCo, where he was pretty golden, which reinforced my suspicions about him doing better when there’s things for him to look at and smell while I go about my people business at the other end of the leash and harness.

All in all I was really pleased with him. For 11 months old and me just now having the energy to start systematic public access training with him, he’s doing really well. It helps that the foundations are there already: he has a good off switch, he’s accustomed to behaving politely. While he got bored and distracted, at no time did he go totally dork-faced and inattentive. I think the thing to do is ask him for brain work in boring places, like getting him to target with nose and paw while I browse the books. We’re also working on “Find Daddy!” and he enjoyed doing that at Borders.

The trip was also good for building my confidence in him. He’s not at the level where I can work with him without being mindful, and won’t be for a long time, but it was good for me to see his bomb-proof and confident self out in the world, getting bored but not anxious, and generally just being an all-around good candidate in the rough. Well, to use a rock-tumbling analogy, I think we’re through the totally rough stage, by virtue of early experience, his essential nature, and basic training in house manners. Now we’re on to the medium grind, and it won’t be too long before we head gleefully off into the pre-polish and polish stages.

Beowulf, bless his heart, taught me a lot about what I want from a service dog. Now Sid is showing me how to get there with him. And we’re having a good time.

29 May, 2011

Busy busy busy

Sixteen new baby chickens have moved into my office/computer room. Ten of them are staying here, six of them are just here because they were showing signs of pasty butt and needed watching while Christine is off doing things unrelated to chickens. So my office is full of cheeping. It’s time to get a silkie pen built, too, so I can get the seven oldest baby out of doors. We might manage to start on that this weekend, we might not.

Meanwhile, Sid went out in mobility harness yesterday to the Farmer’s Market on a training run. He’s not old enough for me to put weight on him but he needs to work in the actual harness, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, because the first time I ever put it on him he nearly sprained his neck trying to see the handle. But anyway he did freakin brilliantly, for real — if he were a kid he’d be performing above grade-level but I’m not sure what the equivalent term is for dogs. Maybe “performing above training level”? Anyhow, the point is that he is pretty bomb-proof and takes crowds in stride. He even got barked at by a dog who was there with one of the vendors and while he glanced at it, that was the extent of his interest. I’m using cheese/praise and verbal corrections (“Negative!” — can you tell I was in the military?) to communicate what the rules of his new job are, and he seems to be getting the point.

This afternoon we’re planning on taking him to an outdoor cafe to see where I’m at in regards to his restaurant training. Probably the one attached to Borders as it’s very low-key and casual and also all the food is paid for in advance and served in to-go containers, so if he’s being a dork we can pick up and leave, no fuss no muss. I wish I could be sure his behavior at home would carry over, because at home he is genius at lying down next to me and ignoring the people food. Fingers crossed!

And just for being patient with me while my posting has slowed down, have a picture of Up, one of the baby Ameraucana bantams who will be staying here. I’ve named them after types of quark, but there’s five of them so I lack a “Down”. I do however have Charmed, Strange, Truth, Beauty, and Up!
Up, a small chick whose body is yellow fluff but whose emerging wing feathers are fantastical and beautiful with subtle patterns of grey-brown on cream, cradled in my hand.

26 May, 2011

Wow.

I keep forgetting to update. I blame busy and ow. We have been busy busy busy finishing off Bantytown (I need to get pics now that it’s Mostly Done) and weeding the garden and on Tuesday Sid went up to Vienna to see a dental specialist, where he wound up losing his left upper canine. He’d damaged it during his Great Crate Escape Escapades and the damage just went too far up the root to save.

Meanwhile, the chickens are doing very well! Here, have a gratuitous picture of Lucifer, the small hostile silkie chicken.
A small chicken is cradled in my hands, staring directly into the camera with a hostile look. His head, neck, and breast are still covered in very pale grey baby down, while his wings are covered in darker steel-grey adult feathering. Some adult feathers are starting to come in on his head, which does not help him look dignified and intimidating.

22 May, 2011

I do not appear to have been raptured.

Spent the time waiting for the Rapture last night with Christine of Blackthorn Kennel, Wanda, and Christine’s Mom. We had a good ol time and consumed nommy Mexican food although I did have to wrestle my cane out of Wanda’s hands — I was carrying the one made of a sassafras stick with an antique doorknob for a handle and she had cane envy. Well, “lust” is maybe a better word given the way she was fondling it. It was sort of…intense. Ahem. I told her the cane was working and not to distract it, but she did not listen and I felt too guilty about trying to distract her service dog in retaliation. Although out of harness Wanda’s dog Blitz is a big sweetie who tried to climb into my lap and stick her tongue up my nose.

Anyway, I picked up a pair of mottled Old English Game bantams that Christine had procured for me on Friday, petted the 4-day-old chicks that arrived from the hatchery Thursday (13 or so of ‘em are mine) and collected 11 eggs from Christine, which are now sitting in my incubator, incubating. Christine has promised to take all the baby chickens away at the end. I just wanted to play with my new toy.

I hope you’re doing well, gentle readers, and that your Saturday was similarly marked with a lack of catastrophic earthquakes &c, and that if you were Raptured it was all you hoped it would be. Come to think of it, if you were Raptured, you probably aren’t reading this. Those of you who are also sticking around for the Tribulations should come on by, we’ve got plenty of eggs and the garden’s looking real nice so there will be plenty to eat.

21 May, 2011

The incubator is creeping me out.

So I set up the incubator, which arrived earlier this week, so it can stabilize before I tuck some eggs in it this evening for Christine, who has graciously agreed to let me hatch some chickens which she will then take away. Which is very nice of her, because that means I can play with my new incubator without being overrun by chickens.

Anyhoo, so it’s set up on my poor abused craft table, in the automatic turner cradle thing which turns it through 90 degrees some mysterious number of times per hour, but here’s the thing: I never see it move. Like, I will look over and it will have moved previously, but despite the fact that I can see it in the corner of my eye, I never actually see the thing in motion. I have resorted to sitting and staring at the incubator, waiting for it, but it won’t move while I’m looking. It only moves when I look away.

It’s creepy, I tell you. CREEPY.

But I still can’t wait to hatch some chicks for Christine in it.

20 May, 2011

A little bruising of the heart.

We moved Merlin, Annaham, and Phoebe out into Bantytown, protected by a grow-out pen so the big chickens don’t peck them to death. I thought they were all big and tough when they were in here, but out there, they’re half the size of the adult banties. Phoebe and Annaham were immediately overcome with delight for bugs and sunbeams (Phoebe even fell over and sunbathed!) but Merlin cried and cried for me to pick him up and pet him. I told him that it’s time for him to learn to be a Big Chicken and live outdoors and think about wooing girl chickens and chasing bugs and crowing and things, but he says he wants to be my House Chicken.

I am trying to stay strong but it was a little heart-bruising to leave him out there with him making pathetic noises at me like that. I wish I had the facilities to keep a small chicken happy in the house, but I really don’t. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to explain that to Merlin.

19 May, 2011

Big days!

Today when I get home from work the three little OEGs, Annaham, Phoebe, and Merlin, will move outside into the grow-out pen. Some of the older silkies will probably move into the unheated brooder since they’re old enough to not need the heat lamp, and soon they’ll be moving outside. Meanwhile, fifteen or so chicks are arriving at Blackthorn Kennel for me this morning, and here at the Manor the Official Banty House and the incubator will both arrive!

I have totally failed this week on my goal to get Sid two outings a week. I blame the rapid-cycling weather, which has had me in relatively brutal pain for days now. He can come with when we go down to Blackthorn to get our chicks on Saturday, though! And possibly I will whomp up a bookstore trip or something for him Sunday.

Meanwhile, it’s 5am, so it must be time to feed the menagerie and then get off to work.

18 May, 2011

Baby Silkies are kind of hilarious.

There are several stages of feather grow-in for baby Silkies.

Here is Amon, demonstrating the adorable stage:
Amon, a tiny grey-brown baby chicken who still has all his baby fluff, stands in profile to the camera. He has wing feathers and a teeny poof of golden down on top of his head where his crest will grow in, and few feathers on his legs.

Lucifer here is working his way towards hilarious:
Lucifer, a tiny grey chicken, stands in profile to the camera. His baby down on his neck and head is pale grey, but darker grey adult feathers are coming in on his wings and legs. And his tail, which is a hilarious cottontail-style poof.

Belphegor, bless his feathery little heart, has achieved Full Hilarious, and also poses like a champ:
A stunning view of Belphegor. From the back. His butt is very fluffy. Also, his black adult feathers are most in, except for on his head and neck, which still sport their dark-grey baby down. His legs are invisible behind their POOF of feathers, and his neck is hilariously long for the rest of him as he looks back at the camera.

17 May, 2011

Let me show you the world in my eyes…

It is a well-known fact among my family that I have always had a highly active imagination. I did not have cats as a kid, I had tame cheetahs. Likewise the nondescript grade mare Sugar who lived at my grandparents’ house was not a nondescript grade mare, but a purebred warhorse on whom I had fantastic adventures. In my teens, when I was reading a great deal of Mercedes Lackey’s books, I leased Harvey Wallbanger, an Arab/Quarter Horse cross, who looked to the rest of the world like a fat and placid gelding, but I knew his secret name and when I whispered it in his ear, he was a Shin’a'in warsteed, the only stallion ever allowed off the Dhorisha Plains, and I his rider. We saved the world a lot.

I have never actually grown out of this tendency, it’s just gone underground. Tink is not actually a Doberman, but a rare Moonhound who lost an eye in battle with the Wargs who come down out of the north in the winter with the snow. Sid is not, in fact, a German Shepherd from East German working lines, but a ferocious and loyal black wolf who pads beside me on my adventures. I’ve taken a religious vow not to ride horses, which is why I no longer have a purebred warsteed. Oh and my husband is not a stay-at-home spouse in the hinterlands of Virginia, but the consort to a warrior Queen who watches over the kingdom while his wife hares off on quests. And while the undiscerning eye might look at Emmaline and Noodlehead and see two tabby-and-white mutt cats, formerly feral, I know that they are in fact Stripey Disapproving Meepers whose ancestors were saved from the sinking of Atlantis by the priests because they can see the future, only in the intervening years they have forgotten how to speak. On one of our quests, Sid and I may discover the key to teaching them to speak again, but then I will obviously need to learn Atlantean.

What? I commute two hours a day and mostly tell myself stories to fill the time.

Anyway, knowing these things, it will come as no surprise to my gentle readers that Belphegor is not, in fact, a small floofy chicken at an exceptionally awkward stage of feather growth, but my raven familiar. Merlin and Annaham, who greet me enthusiastically and demand to be picked up, are not adolescent chickens but fierce small hawks. Mostly they play along and humor me, being good-hearted birds. I mourn the day they all grow up and become more interested in bugs and chickens of the opposite sex than perching majestically on my wrist, although it is possible I suppose that they will always be willing to perch majestically on my wrist, and possibly I can even train them to swoop down on my foes.

Merlin is working on it already. He just needs some more practice distinguishing friend from foe.
Merlin, a very small crele chicken (white with grey stripes on his back and brown ones on his breast) stands triumphantly atop Daniel's head. Daniel's eyes are closed.

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