A quiet week of recovery still brought important discoveries as Nakina’s Canine Cognition results and a challenging separation exercise revealed new opportunities for growth.

🐾 Covid

It’s been a quiet week. I tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, and Nakina started showing signs of Covid the next day with sneezing and lethargy. So we have mostly just been taking it slow and giving ourselves time to recover.

Training

On Sunday, we had the final day of the two-day Canine Cognition workshop. Nakina’s profile is Improviser … so basically, if she isn’t sure what to do, she just makes it up. That is no surprise and actually makes me happy. It just means that I need to be accurate and quick with my cues, which I already knew. I also like that she is willing to try other things if she isn’t sure what I’m asking. That willingness to experiment is exactly what good shaping is built on.

Monday was Labor Day, so my son had the day off from work. Nakina and I went to his house to see what she would do if I left her alone with him for a few minutes in an unfamiliar environment. My son is her absolute favorite person on the planet, but she was extremely stressed when I left the house, even for just a minute. That gave me some really useful information. What we are seeing doesn’t appear to be typical separation anxiety. It seems to be separation-related stress in unfamiliar environments. The environment itself appears to be part of what is making her uncomfortable. Now that I have a better understanding of what is happening, I know what we need to work on.

We had to skip our Tricks and private lesson on Thursday and our Scent Work class on Saturday since I had tested positive for Covid.

We did continue working at home whenever we both felt up to it. We are continuing to prepare for the ATT and continued desensitization with the calming cap, Gentle Leader, travel crate and zipper, and riding calmly in the car. We also continued working on dumbbell holds and chin rests.

Even with a quieter week, everything is progressing quite nicely.

Socialization

Other than narrowing down the issue with separation, we didn’t do any focused socialization work this week because of my quarantine. Sometimes, though, learning what the problem actually is can be just as valuable as another week of training.

What's Next

• Emergency Stop & Hand Targeting — reintroduce and build consistency
• Down vs. settle — continue creating a clear distinction
• Recall — continue on leash in more distracting environments
• li style="text-align: left;">Grooming — begin grooming desensitization on the table
• Continue elevator desensitization

This week didn’t go quite as planned, but we still learned something important about Nakina and made progress in the areas we could work on. And if I have to be home sick with anyone, I’m glad to have Nakina by my side. ❤️