Today was the last class of the semester and it was bittersweet. We learned so many things though.
We started with Linda giving us a recap of her Bond-based Choice Teaching Seminar that she attended over the weekend. All of the training that she taught us was based on the bond that you form with the dog. She told us a lot of quotes that she learned during the seminar. A lot of what she learned was based off of the principle of "Do as I Do" training where you teach the dog to learn through observational learning. I find it absolutely fascinating. The people who taught this seminar train all through questions, it's about giving the dog some sort of control over their lives, so if they get what they need, they won't push to get it. We did this exercise where we shared food with the dogs to help bond with the dogs. You make the food that you're eating so interesting and then you offer to share it with the dog, so essentially you are sharing a resource, so you can do this with water or food or toys. Now I know some of you may be thinking, so you're just sharing your dinner right? Wrong, in this case it is deliberate sharing of the food, so typically you're on the floor with the dog and sharing a dog friendly snack (pretzels and peanut butter, string cheese, goldfish, teddy grahams). She also talked about how they do a lot of playing and letting the dogs win to help them build their confidence. They also play a lot of choice games so the dogs learn to make choices. We also finished a lot of the presentations, which was really exciting because one of the presenters talked about "Do as I Do" training, so it connected to Linda's presentations! We also talked about Fear too, which is really helpful with Benji! We also looked at Dog-Dog play, which was useful because I live at a house full of dogs, so now I can identify the right kind of dog play and behaviors that should be displayed during dog play. My partner, Ashley, also gave a presentation about nose work in dogs and how the dogs smell, which I found so cool because dogs have 200 million olfactory nerves (humans have 5 million), even though her presentation was while looking at cadaver dogs, it has a lot of merit with diabetic alert training and what you can do if maybe a dog loves to smell, but they don't do so well in public because "smell is smell" as her presentation was on. Lastly, we took group, team, and individual photos with the dogs!!
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