Greetings everyone and welcome to day 6 of training.
This training day had me extremely nervous when I heard what we were suppose to be doing. if you recall, Monte is super attached to our GDMI Stephanie and it mainly shows during working time. He completely ignores her in the building, but when it’s time to go out to work, yeah all bets are off. So I was emotionally stressed out for this mornings fun lesson.
Time for traffic checks
Wait, wait, wait, what, it’s too soon for those! I’m sooooooooo definitely not ready to get squished by Phil the super squisher~ No no no, isn’t this suppose to be later?
Ah, another thing they changed, traffic checks now happen sooner. I normally wouldn’t care and would be looking forward to them to see how my pup does. But erm, this time I’m extremely nervous about what’s going to happen. Will Monte pay attention to me or will he look towards Stephanie first to make sure he’s doing right?
Turns out, I didn’t need to worry after all. Monte was a super star. He nailed all of those traffic checks and didn’t check in with Stephanie at all. He didn’t even care about the deer and the squirrels. Yes, you read that correctly, apparently there was a deer hanging around one of the street crossings as well.
How about those obstacles?
For our afternoon route we got to try out obstacles. These I wasn’t too nervous about since they can’t run me over. Could land on me or something, but not squish me like a bug, 🙂
OMG, Monte is a super pro when it comes to obstacles. He stops and shows me what’s in front of me and then I let him figure out what would be the best way by giving him the command, forward, find the way.
For our first obstacle it was completely across the sidewalk in front of me and Monte chose to go around it on the left and then immediately took us back to the sidewalk once we were around whatever was in the way.
Now, the next set was a little work on his part and a slight stephanie distraction. so I had an obstacle and a half, lol. However, once I got him all straightened out he did what he was suppose too. This set of obstacles were where he had to zigzag, left and then right and then back to the left to get back going on our path.
So those first obstacles were ones set up by Leader on purpose. Monte and I worked down Main Street which is a super busy street and has nature obstacles, people, screaming babies, billboards and chairs and all that.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Stephanie was not attached to us and Monte did an awesome job. He didn’t look at her once going through all of those. He searched for her after we made it through. i was very proud of him.
Now for the last leg of the trip back towards the training center it definitely took some work. He was very much so Stephanie distracted. Almost to the point where I wasn’t quite sure which way was up and what was down. But, we got ourselves sorted out and came to the final Leader placed obstacle.
This one again covered the sidewalk and I let Monte choose the way. This time he picked to go towards the right, towards the street to get around what was in front of us. so, due to him picking this way I needed to give him a bit more direction on which way to go to get us back to the sidewalk and he did an awesome job.
Obstacles, not named Stephanie will not be an issue. I will have nothing to worry about. At least, not at the moment.
Please remember to also check out my podcast, Welcome to Chaos with May on your podcast player of choice because you never know what you may find there, that you don’t read here, 🙂
See you at the next entry.