This morning, a friend followed us around the neighborhood and took videos of our work for Eduardo, Doggie’s human. We practiced and recorded all the skills Doggie had practiced. Below are two of them, showing things I haven’t shown in my previous posts.

Stop and sit at the curb

The first video is the goal behavior for our city puppy: Eduardo’s greatest challenge has been the fact that Doggie isn’t afraid of cars and hasn’t learned to stay on the sidewalk. He could be roaming freely if only he learned to respect sidewalk boundaries. Doggie’s other high-energy challenges come from the fact that Eduardo’s family doesn’t have a yard, and that unlike their other Mals, Doggie is the kind of dog who will run back and forth across busy streets – and they live in a busy car neighborhood. To keep him safe, he has been confined or on leash – and that has made it hard for Doggie to keep his teeth and paws to himself whenever his humans have time for him!

The goal behavior is for Doggie to stop at the curb even if the human gets going and even if food is dropped (not on video, but we’ve worked up to this successfully), and sit before being released. I still use a sit cue (¡Siéntate!) in this video, but as Eduardo and his dad and sister keep working on this, it will eventually become an offered sit. The sit is a safety behavior in addition to stopping: once it is well-rehersed, if one behavior breaks down, it will be the first one – sitting – rather than the second one – staying on the curb. A dog who stands on the sidewalk rather than sits is better than a dog who jumps in front of a car!

I’ve only worked on this behavior for a week. While we’ve generalized to many sidewalks, Eduardo and his family will need to continue working on it to really turn it into a habit. In the video below, I show how to help Doggie if he steps off the sidewalk before his release cue (¡Libre!)

We also went into the dog park again (no video), where Doggie’s confidence around new dogs had grown even more than on day #5, and my friend took a few pictures of Doggie and me – I want memories of Doggie’s time with me! This one is my favorite:

After a longer outing, we headed back home where Doggie practiced staying home alone with the girls while I went back out for a lesson with the young gentleman below:

The manual for being a juvenile Mal

Doggie was being a good, relaxed boy for the rest of the day … until I had a video consult! As the manual for being a juvenile Malinois requires, he woke up just in time to unplug my Internet not just once, but twice. Unfortunately for Don Doggie, he got tethered before he had a chance to kick my clients off the call a third time.

We ended the day – our last day together! – rolling around the couch in an attempt to get all four of us in a picture … with varying levels of success!