Nash is such a super star. He is now having his workouts with no leash at all and just using his remote. His off-leash manners are great and though he still has all that terrier attitude and spunk he is easier to correct for little shenanigans around the house.
Now that he is reliable off-leash we are going to start upping his distraction level and asking him to work for longer periods. We are also going to try to get him into town for a field trip to see how he does around bigger pulls to his attention.
Overall I’m very pleased with how far he has come. He is a hard worker and he never tires so he is a fun dog to train for sure.

Keeping things short because my internet connection has been struggling. Nash is doing great. He is becoming more and more reliable with his remote collar. For some reason his Come command was a little sloppy today and so we are going to rehash that tomorrow and make sure we're not confused about anything.
Nash is an intense worker and he enjoys it but he is also a smarty pants who likes to get into mischief and sometimes that desire wins over obedience. But every day he gets easier and easier to correct back into whatever command he was being a snotball about. 
Tomorrow we are under a heat advisory and so workouts will be short and sweet but we'll continue working nonetheless. 

My internet connection keeps blinking in and out so I might keep this short. Findley is coming right along! She is almost finished with her training and her confidence is growing. I do think that her owner is going to need to continue working on her confidence level after Findley goes home but her commands are solid. She just gets unsure of herself sometimes. Today she struggled with Down but that's because she wanted to be on my feet. Her off-leash heel and autosit are greatly improved but she still gets distractible now and then. Basically she is still very puppy. Her Placemat is wonderful and her on-leash obedience is stellar. 
Tomorrow we are in a heat advisory and so her workouts are going to be very short but we will hopefully have a fairly normal work day.

Nash is SO happy. We got him on his remote collar today and he zoomed around the yard with Gracie for almost 20 minutes without stopping. This celebration was fun to watch and it also meant he slept for a bit after which made for an easy afternoon for me. 
His off-leash come command is pretty good for being relatively new and his other commands are coming along fine but they still require a leash at the moment. You can see some inner turmoil when he really wants to dart off and make you chase him instead of coming but he is learning quickly that I won't chase him and all he'll get is a correction if he blows off a Come command.
Tomorrow we start his clean up of his obedience and start grooming him for not needing a physical leash at all. I'm proud of him and am pleased with his progress. He's a stinker for sure but he learns quickly and enjoys the work.

Findley is doing great. Her workouts are now off-leash and they are becoming more and more solid every time we practice. She knows her commands well but there are still some things I'm trying to smooth out for her. She still really prefers to lay down when I stop instead of sit. This default probably has to do with her being a bit on the shy side and wanting to make herself look small. She is also startles easily still and so she needs some confidence building to keep her safe when she is off leash. She doesn't bolt far but she does dart out of Heel for a second if something spooks her and I worry that if something really scared her she might dart into the street before she could be recalled. 
Really she just needs practice and reassurance that she is doing the right thing. She is a smart cookie and mostly just doesn't believe she is getting the answer right.
Tomorrow we are working on building her up and making her feel confident about her commands so that she isn't so worried she'll make a mistake. Other than that and her tendency to lay down instead of sit I'm really happy with where she is right now.

So dog trainers aren't supposed to have "favorite breeds" but we all do. Nash is one of my favorite breeds and I'm already really enjoying him. A large and strong Rat Terrier boy, Nash is here for a week of off-leash work and some extra boarding. A lot of his foundation was laid by another trainer and so I am building on what he already knows.
Rat Terriers are enterprising and feisty and always ready to work. Today we rehashed some of the obedience he already knows so I could get a base level for him figured out. Tomorrow the work begins of building on that and seeing if we can get his obedience to go farther. I'm confident he will do well and as soon as we have him on his remote collar he will have a ton of fun out here running around the farm. For now he is playbowing to his roommate in the kennel next to him. They have become fast friends (in more ways than one!) and tuckered each other out today.

Findley had a blast today. A ton of fun stuff happened. The most exciting thing is that she got to take her leash off! She finally got to really bound around the yard and bug the chickens and dash about with Ace like she has wanted to all last week. Her workouts still happen on leash some of the time but for play time, potty time, and for our exercise walk she is off-leash and loving it. Her Come command is SO much better now and her willingness to follow in general has greatly improved.
The other happy thing is that she ADORES the new boarder here. He is a large rat terrier boy named Nash and they get along famously. So I hardly had to exercise them at all because they spent so much of the day tearing after each other and rough housing.
Tomorrow we are pushing her off-leash obedience a little harder and making sure we don't develop any anxiety now that we aren't on-leash anymore. We're also going to push Placemat in the house a little bit harder too.

Findley is making decent progress and coming out of her shell really nicely. She is such a sweet and stoic girl she can be difficult to read sometimes which can make it interesting to try make sure she is enjoying training. Her heel command and Autosit is going well though she sometimes lays down instead of sits. Her come command actually showed marked improvement today after a couple days of not a ton of progress. She is on a 30 foot leash when we practice it and she only needs a tiny bit of guidance anymore. Once she starts coming in the right direction she Comes perfectly but getting her to turn and approach you in the first place is the hard part. She simply has other things to do first!
 Her Down command is probably her best command right now. It seems to be her favorite. She likes to lay down on my feet which isn't exactly the right thing but it's pretty darn close. I'm cleaning up her obedience this weekend and hopefully will introduce her to a remote collar on Sunday, Monday at the latest. I think it will be a big game changer once she realizes that it means she can go farther but also that it means she can't refuse a Come command without getting a correction. 
She is such a cuddly sweetheart and I'm very pleased with her progress especially after a few days of really not seeming very inspired by the come command (which is the most important thing we can teach a dog). She's doing great.

My friend Maci goes home tomorrow. While she has certainly been a dog who I will never forget and one that challenged me in ways I've never been challenged before her obedience training has actually been fairly straight forward. She knows her words but she is also a total pistol who likes to make her own choices. This is definitely the mark of an intelligent and enterprising dog. However, she is also very very sweet natured and she enjoys making her people happy and so she wants to get the answer right. Her mischief Tends to happen when she is bored or absent minded. I am confident that she will grow into a very delightful adult dog but I'm equally confident that her adolescence isn't quite finished yet. 
I look forward to showing her people everything she has learned. She likes to put her own Maci spin on her commands which isn't always the most dignified thing but she tries so hard and she's made me laugh for a solid two weeks. I'll miss her sweet, funny face.

Spunky little Findley had a fun day today. We had 3 workouts and a lot of house time in between. She has been introduced to Heel, Sit, Down, Implied Stay and Come. By far the command she toils with most is the Come command. She doesn't try to run off (she hasn't been off-leash yet anyway since it's too soon) but she simply doesn't respond to it yet. She tends to just look at me in a way that screams "I have absolutely no incentive to get up and come to you. I'm comfy here. You can come to me if you want to pet me." So my job is to create some interest in and incentive to come to me when she is called. What I did today was use her puppy-following instinct to my advantage. When I would call her I would also walk backward in a kind of inviting and bouncy way and she would playfully follow. Once she approached me I would ask her to sit then I would praise her like she saved the world. I'm hoping that this exercise raises her interest in coming when called. We'll see how she does with this tomorrow.
Her other commands are coming along nicely though. She is responsive and sweet natured and so she picks things up easily but if she doesn't see what's in it for her she can be a bit of a stinker about things. But it's still only day two so we'll take our time and see if we can make training as fun as possible for Findley. She certainly seems to be enjoying it so far even if the part she is enjoying is staring at me like I'm from another planet until I do the funny bouncy walk to get her to approach me. I always say I will do whatever it takes to get a dog to learn something and to enjoy learning it and sometimes that means being a bit of a fool. But Findley is doing great and she is such a bright girl.