Hey, Lexi! That's Linus' mat!
Lexi, Lexi, Lexi, you are such a stinker! She will do everything perfectly for 10 minutes and then she decides it's time to throw a party and loses her mind. She just needs practice with self restraint. I am going to actually take a slight step back tomorrow (as is sometimes necessary) and put her back on a leash just to keep her focused a little bit better. She also gets a little stressed out if she ever doesn't understand what it is I want from her. Some dogs will try a few different things to see if they can guess it right. She doesn't guess. If she knows the answer to what I ask her to do she does it, usually, without a problem. But if she doesn't know or understand she gets very upset and becomes a bit inconsolable. She even tried hiding from me (I promise, I was not being scary). What this means is that I will simply have to teach her everything thoroughly and not let her get too wrapped up in her anxiety.
When she is on her game her Heel/Autosit is awesome. Her Down is around 75% accurate (when we do Down from the Front she tries to wiggle to my feet). Her recall is abismal. It wasn't until late in the day that she was coming to me routinely without either flat out ignoring me or just laying down and stressing out about it. Her Implied stay is surprisingly good. It still needs practice but she definitely gets it and rarely does it cause her any anxiety. She learned Placemat today with almost no problem. She just needs a little practice. The only issue was that she wanted to be on Linus' placemat with him so that they could play. If I turned my back tonight while I had all 5 dogs on Place I would turn back around to see them snuggled up together, playing. On her own, however, she did quite will with Place. She would get up without permission but she would do it in a way that let me know she knew better (usually army crawling). With a little bit of practice I think she will learn to like her mat very much.
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