Teething, training. digging, and the naughty crate!!

Sorry, I've been lazy with my updating again!! Here's a bit of an update on the last few weeks! In many areas Inko is doing very well - some, we're working on!!

She is looking very cute at the moment (ok I may be a little biased, but I'm a proud mum and think she's beautiful!). We had some professional photos taken at Pets at Home the other week and entered one of them into a competition they were running - we should find out in a few weeks whether she's won. I scanned them onto the computer at work but forgot to send them to myself so have just taken photos of the photos (!) so that I can post them on here - so they aren't as clear as they are in the originals but it was the only way of getting copies.

'Good 'down', Inko!'






'Look mummy and daddy, I'm smiling :)'

Such a cutie! This is the one we've entered into the competition

Teething

Inko is full swing with her teething now and has quite a mix of baby teeth, gaps and new teeth!! Not the neatest of mouths right now but at least there are far fewer of those needle like baby teeth now!! Inko is still doing a lot of chewing (not of furniture....of us!) - not as painful as it was with a full mouth of baby teeth but her jaw is getting very strong now and she has quite a grip which can be painful if one of her teeth manages to dig in!!

Zero tolerance!

This chewing/biting was starting to become a bit of a problem, as was her barking for attention, so we have got a new crate.....a naughty crate!! We are trying to be very good with a new zero tolerance regime, whereby any barking for attention or biting is followed by a firm 'No!' and her being taken into the naughty crate for some time out!! Overall I think this is starting to have a positive effect, although we're not there entirely yet! I think she's definitely got to the stage where she is settled enough here to start seeing how far she can push things and what she can get away with!! We're hoping that by being firm with her will make her realise that barking for attention and biting is not acceptable. Some days she is great (which is a good improvement on this behaviour every day) but as is to be expected there are also some days where she still tries it on quite a bit and there are a few trips to the naughty crate!!

Training

We had our last Heelwork to Music class before Christmas last Sunday. Inko is progressing really well...even if \I'm still getting confused by what way to spin myself etc!! She has now doing (still lured by treats at the moment):

• heel (her walking next to my left hand side)
• close (her walking next to my right hand side)
• spin (her spinning round on my left hand side)
• twist (her spinning round on my right hand side)
• bow
• dart through (her next to me then me twisting round and stepping over her as I do)
• back track (walking backwards)
• over (only going over my legs while I'm sat flat on the floor as she's still too young to do big jumping)
• under
• crawl
• stick around (walking round my legs close to me)
• weave

I must make sure we keep up the training on these over Christmas, not least so that me and Adam don't forget what they all are!! We're also been trying to keep up the stuff we did in obedience class. I've been really working on 'down' with her as she has always been good at this when there is a lure and when I'm putting my hand on the floor in front of her but as it's such a useful command for politeness around people I wanted to make her respond more just to a verbal command. She will now do this which is good (although I'm not sure whether this has actually now just become her default first response to a command for 'something' or whether she genuinely knows the word?). I've also been working on getting her to stay in a down position for more than just a split second by delaying any treating and using the 'wait' comm and which she is quite good at now.

Pulling

An area we've not noticed much improvement in is her loose lease walking, probably due to laziness from us rather than anything else. She is walked on a lead in the mornings before work, but off lead in the evenings. As the morning is a time when we are shorter of time, and we want to ensure she has a decent bit of exercise before we leave her for a bit, we have got lazy and have not been correcting her pulling as consistently has we should have been. This is becoming more noticeable as she gets stronger and stronger! We have ordered a Lupi harness to try so will give that a go and we'll also have to try and get better at doing all the necessary things to try and get her walking better loosely on the lead. Not expecting full 'to heel' walking necessarily, but looser would be nice. She's good when we have a treat in hand, but other than that there are far more interesting things ahead to try and get to!!

Digging

We've also found that her digging has just started up again - we went out the other day to discover a really rather large hole!! Because of the bad weather we can't use her sand pit at the moment....mostly because it turns out the lid is not very water proof and it is now more of a sandy bottomed swimming pool and Inko is not particularly keen on water!! So, after several weeks of no digging and us thinking she'd grown out of that, she has proved us wrong with the big hole! Maybe she thought the flowerbed looked bare and should have a large shrub planted - she's definitely given us a hole big enough to put one in with ease!! Lol. Unfortunately another side effect of her re-learned love of digging is that she is using her 'need to go to the loo' bell as a 'can I go out and dig' bell. We're having to ignore the bell when she first rings and see if she persistently stays there. If she comes away after a bit it seems to be that she wants to dig, and finally gives in, but if she is staying there it tends to mean she needs to loo and we let her out!

But she's still lovely despite all that!

Despite the few ongoing challenges in some areas with her she is such a lovely little thing to have round the house! We are loving all the walks with her (especially the weekend ones where we walk with our friends who also have dogs where she gets really tired out and is sleepy all afternoon afterwards! Lol!). We are also really enjoying the challenge of doing the training with her (the obedience, heelwork and general good behaviour training) as that was one of the reasons for getting a lappy that we knew we'd have to work hard with for the first two years - we wanted a dog that would make us put the effort in!

Can't believe it's only just over a month until she's 6 months old!! Time has flown, although also feels like she's been here so much longer than she has! We must start doing more work on the ringcraft side of things while the classes aren't running over Christmas so that we're getting ourself ready for show number one - that will be the Slough and District open show at the start of February. We're hoping to pick up a show lead for Inky Dink at the Guildford show that we're going to pop over to this afternoon!