07/08/2026
How it started vs how it ended! 🤣
This guy stayed with me for a couple of weeks for my service dog training! We worked on his public training and started to teach him to retrieve objects for his dad who is in a wheelchair at times. He’s a lab and is a bringer of toys but the joke was on me in the beginning. We worked with stuff he already liked to carry. I played around with shaping the behavior of him interacting with the object with the end result to be to bring it to hand. In the beginning, he liked to throw things at me, drop them on my foot, pretend to touch them and offer minimal effort with the hope of a maximum prize. It was a rough couple days. 😂🤦🏻♀️ With time and patience and those Labrador genes playing in our favor (and a trusty clicker of course) he got it and finally brought things to my hand/lap! I’m so excited and proud of this young guy! He’s still doing well at home and his family practices with him with new weird different objects.
(Don’t look at my floors- I had a ton of yellow dogs at my house and the hair shows up like crazy. I vacuum daily!)
