Layla's attention has been great at home. She's doing really well responding to her name and she will hold her attention for quite a while. Home is easy.
Even when all your friends are around...if they are friends you are use to seeing every day. Layla has been here for three days now so her new found friends are slightly less exciting than they were on day one. It's a great time to practice her attention is a moderately distracting environment. We started out in a quiet room with no one around and now we're working in a comfortable environment but with familiar distractions.
It's a whole different ball game when we go into a new environment. Even with no other animals around and no people nearby, being on the sidewalk outside some local stores proved to be very distracting.
Before we went into a store, we needed to be sure to take care of a couple of things first. Some dogs do not like to go to the bathroom on leash or in new places so it can be challenging. You don't ever want to take a dog into a store without making sure they relieve themselves. But Layla is a champ and went to the bathroom when I asked her to. It makes going into a store so much less stressful when you don't have to worry about accidents.
The next thing we did was stay in a quiet area on the sidewalk and worked on attention. I was armed with high value treats (string cheese, jerky, duck, etc.) to make sure I could reward her with something of interest to her. Sometimes, in distracting environments, what once was a favorite treat is now of no interest at all so I have a variety in case something doesn't work. She was pretty distracted so we spent a lot of time on the sidewalk working through this. I don't move towards the store until I'm getting pretty good attention from her pretty consistently. We only spent a short time in the store by the door. She was pretty distracted. I can tell we're going to need to practice this quite a bit more.
Going into public places can be very stressful on a dog so we are sure to make time for some stress relief when we get back home. We were very grateful for just a little bit of dry weather this afternoon. Makes for a very fun afternoon!
Little Miss Layla Blu is working hard and definitely melting hearts...
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