Now that Sia has had some practice responding to commands with the distraction of one dog, it's time to step it up a bit.
I set my criteria a little bit lower in this new environment but it doesn't take long before she's at the level she was with one dog. By the end of this training session, my expectations were as high as they were when she was with one dog. Proofing her in a wide variety of environments and under different circumstances will help her be more responsive in all aspects of her life.
And even harder is doing a down with all the other dogs around but she succeeds! It's also a good time to work on her stays with distractions.
If I'm going to catch her before she breaks a stay, I don't want her to get any further than this before I redirect her. It's much more difficult to get her back down if she's gotten all the way up. Better yet, if I can catch her just as she's getting a little wiggly and thinking about getting up it's much easier to reinforce the stay. Just saying "no, stay" is enough to settle her back down into her stay. And, of course, lots of praise when she complies.
Her barking is another behavior that is much easier to curb before she starts barking. When a neighbor made some noise on the other side of the fence I could tell she was going to bark by her body language.
But, if I can get her attention before she barks, she'll start to learn that it pays off more to pay attention to me rather than bark. Most of the work you do to decrease the barking happens before she barks. She's already getting the idea that if she sees someone outside, if she comes and checks in with me instead of barking, she'll get rewarded. This also makes it much easier to redirect her if she does get a bark out before I catch her.
It's just one more reason why attention work is so important. So many things start to fall in place once you can get her to pay attention to you no matter what is going on.
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