Yesterday after I got home from work, Dexter and I had another short session. Ok... well I thought it was short, but as the video below shows it was almost 5 minutes. He kept his attention pretty well, but it was still too long. We worked on touching the target again, which he did pretty well. However, he is now defaulting to laying down. The night before, I had started to briefly work on the "down", but it was making him act very strangely. He would do it fine for a few repetitions, and then he'd back way up all of the sudden and not want to come close to me. I am not sure if he is unsure what he's supposed to be doing maybe? Maybe with no "prop" like the target dish he feels uncomfortable? Not sure.
In any case, while working on touch, he kept wanting to lay down while he did it. I was trying to only click for nose touches while he was standing.
After target touches, I was going to work on down again, but as soon as I remove the target, you can kind of see how he laid down a few feet away from me, didn't want to move. So I quickly decided to nix that idea and do a hand touch instead - he HAS to be close to me to touch my hand!! He picked up on the hand touch pretty quickly. I worked on hand touch again for a quick minute or two during dinner, and he also did well there. I will start working on the hand touch without my hand directly in front of his face (slightly above his head, etc, so he has to work for it)
Tonight I am teaching BRAG class, and am going to go down a little bit ahead of time to take him in one of the office rooms to work on his touch and feed him food. He is still intimidated by the building so I really want to work on getting him comfortable.
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