Yea! The Kong was a success...a mess, but a success. I usually stuff them with kibble mixed with a little plain yogurt and frozen. That's not nearly as messy as raw meat. So it might take some fine tuning to find the right Kong stuffing for her that doesn't require laundering her bedding every day but well worth it to nip the yodelling in the bud.
Sia does LOVE her food. I noticed she was taking treats a little bit rough. Because we want to work on more self control, this is a good thing to work on. To teach a dog to take treats nicely, I place a treat under my thumb on the palm of my hand. While she is trying to get it, I wait until I feel her tongue or a soft mouth. If I feel her teeth at all, I continue to hide the treat from her. She keep trying different things to get the treat and when she finally tries using her tongue or a really soft mouth, I say "YES!" and give her a treat.
I doesn't take her long before she figures it out. I can do sessions that deal specifically with this issue and I can also require her to take it softly any time I give her a treat. So even if she has done a skill really, really well, I'm still going to be consistent with her about making her take the treat nicely. Once she has the idea, I start to add the word "easy" before giving her the treat.
I noticed a new behavior today that I had not seen from Sia before. She's barking at people she sees outside the window. I want to teach her an alternate response to seeing strange people. Instead, I'd like her to come check in with me. So, if I'm watching her at the window and I can see she's about to bark, I will say "Sia, come" and reward her heavily for coming to me. If I can't be right there with her at the window to catch her before she barks, I'm going to block her access to that window. I don't want her to practice that behavior. It's really rewarding for a dog to bark at someone and then have them leave. That reinforces the barking behavior ("I bark, the mail carrier goes away...great, that worked!").
It's hard when a girl gets distracted by everything around her...even when it's high up in the sky. But the really nice thing is, that even though she is testing the waters in this particular developmental stage, she still has a foundation underneath all of that to fall back onto.
Even though she still occasionally thinks about being naughty, the times she does that are much fewer and she is much easier to redirect.
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