The Labraventures of Carbón, Spanish (ex-) foster dog extraordinaire

Emily_Babbelhund

Emily_Babbelhund

Mama Red HOT Pepper
Location
Regensburg, Germany
Natalie said:
He's a brilliant boy. So ... How do you move to knowing he will lie still for 6 hours on a plane? Or are you happy for him to stand up and walk up and down the aisles quite a bit?
Click to expand...
The short answer is that I'll know if he'll lie still for six hours on the plane after we've been on the plane for six hours.

A lot of things - such as how he reacts to air pressure changes and cabin noise - I just won't know until we do it. Ideally we'd do a short hop somewhere as practice (my initial puppy plan was to do Munich-Venice first as it's only 30 minutes) but that got tossed. Now we just go for it and see what happens.

Brogan never got up at all after boarding the plane: I didn't think it was even allowed. My SD trainer says it is allowed but I'll get up with him only if I absolutely have to (like a loo run). Getting a dog down an aisle with dozens of bored people along the way is really tough. It's not the dog, it's the humans - they have a tendency to reach out and grab the dog.

All that sounds fairly dire but I don't think it will be. Carbon is impervious to loud noises and has proved a very good sailor so is used to strange movements under him. He did great on our train trip to Rome. He regularly does 6-8 hour drive days with me where he doesn't move a muscle. Even if we don't get an empty seat next to us, he is small enough that he will have plenty of room to stretch out comfortably in my foot space. If I can manage to train him to scoot backwards while laying down, he'll even have his head towards me (unlike Brogan) so that I can interact with him. There are training games we do now that we can do on the plane. Plus his schedule now meshes well with the flight: he'll have his regular elimination times -10am and 9pm - and a big chunk of the first flight will be when he usually snoozes in the afternoon.

I'll just have to stay very alert and try to manage the inevitable surprises that come up. At this point I'm more worried about the security check and if we come across police dogs which are fairly common in US airports. I'm also a bit worried about me using the loo on the first 10 hour flight. Brogan would just stay put...no way Carbon will so he'll need to come with me. THAT will be an adventure in itself! :LOL:
 
Emily_Babbelhund

Emily_Babbelhund

Mama Red HOT Pepper
Location
Regensburg, Germany
Lisa said:
Yeesh I can’t even imagine trying to manage a plane toilet with a Labrador! How could you both fit?? :|
Click to expand...
Ashley said:
Could you leave carbon in a stay in the flight attendant area that is usually at the back of the plane near washrooms while you go?
Click to expand...
He won't fit - like @Ashley says, I'll have to throw myself on the mercy of a flight attendant to hold his lead for a couple minutes. :)
 
M

M.F.

Wow from me, too. Just WOW!!! I know I’ve said it before, but this boy spent his first year in a concrete cell and look how enthusiastic he is now! Wow! He is so lucky you came along.
 
Emily_Babbelhund

Emily_Babbelhund

Mama Red HOT Pepper
Location
Regensburg, Germany
M.F. said:
Wow from me, too. Just WOW!!! I know I’ve said it before, but this boy spent his first year in a concrete cell and look how enthusiastic he is now! Wow! He is so lucky you came along.
Click to expand...
I'm just so proud of him! My first few sessions with his SD trainer, she cautioned me that all dogs don't make service dogs. Now she classes him up there with the smartest dogs she's seen. The speed of our getting through the curriculum has everything to do with MY learning rate, not Carbon's. Our trainer said today that she wished we were local (she is in Canada) so she could work with him in person. You'd better believe he'd be learning faster that way. ;)

Funny thing: we've been working on backing up for a few weeks now. I wasn't able to increase distance because he kept doing this weird sideway sashay thing instead of hitting the foot target. I wanted to whack my head against the wall because I KNOW he knows how to back up. He's been volunteering it in our walks outside and even sashayed backwards around a display in a bookstore a few days ago.

Then earlier in the week while we're practicing, I realised he was doing something else during 'backing sessions'. So that I can see if he's hit the foot target, I tilt my head to the side. Guess what he was doing? He'd back up to the side and then tilt he his head! He was copying me!

I told this to our SD trainer in our session on Wednesday and she asked me how many reps we were doing in each session. We were doing ten, which is what she recommends in her curriculum. "He's bored," she said, "And he's figuring other things to do you might want...like the head tilt". She said because he's so smart he doesn't need 10 reps. "Do 4, then take a play break of a minute or so, then up the criteria and do four again."

We did that today and made more progress in 15 minutes on backing than we had in three weeks. The only time I repeated a criteria is in the video above...and you see him dancing to one side and the other and self-correcting. He hadn't done that on the other sessions, just this one where I repeated the same criteria. In other words, he is indeed jazzing it up when he feels like he's mastered something: cheeky monkey! :LOL:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top