oh great--- i woke up at 3am... and figured ..i'd work on the video, send those poo picker samples to adi, cut a hoel in a bucket and set that u[,lay out the chapters in THE BOOK , find my 2 recordig things.. make the bed for real, then i got my shoes and sox on and had to rest for 29 minutes.... it sounds so simple until you have to actually move... i watch all those ads- elderly people cheerfully swallowing a pill and jogging off onto a beach pain free, except for their handy dandy oxygen hose stuck in their nose...-- i will get those things done....maybe by nap time.... not by 9:00 like i did before...
this book has posibilities-- not because anyone is interested in the actual accident....or the pain of my #$%^&* sore toe... but because i was on that mission to train a service dog on the subway...-- and in training a dog for service, or otherwise.. there is an element of ... if i am unsure, then the dog will pick it up..- so before i started with an actual puppy/teenage dog.. i wanted to be sure all systems were "go" with my solid dog ... bentley. this kind of philosophy in dog training is critical with our danes... 99.4% of all danes are timid..... this is a huge problem for the golden retriever trainers where "timid" in a normal dog can lead to fear biting... and fear biting is a real thing....however with our danes, i have never seen it.. "fear peeing all over your foot" is far more likely....so in starting our danes, we want them to learn that when the world gets wierd, they will be perfectly safe if they just stay with their partner. the way we raise our pups from day one.. (well maybe day 21) is to encourage solid bonding. since our danes "read" their partners so well, we have to be very aware of how the partner is thinking and feeling. i am pretty careful that dog destined to become service dogs don't get bonded to anyone here -- sometimes overnights are good... but never one dog same staff.
evidence that i might be right is that having been knocked over and screaming by electrical shock, once bentley was clear of the shock,,, he stayed with me--most dogs would have run wildly away...many will rightly suggest loyalty- but i know part of it is "i don't know what else to do besides stay with her"
this can get very complicated when we are dealing with PTSD in addition to a balance problem.... if we have an applicant who is "timid" we have to get a dog to a point where the dog is so secure that it can deal with a bit of role reversal.. classic photo is the one of finn- at the age ot ?10 months, standing without a person or leash on a corner -.... in times square????? finn has to be figuring "it can't get any stranger than this"
and he has gone on now to work with eve... at cheerleading practice???? then there is george's picture today-- standing rock still while bella tris to stand after spinal surgery.. he has to be thinking " i must hold very still because she somehow got her head stuck in that metal thing.. i have seen such a thing before... maybe they are trying to get her ears to stand up like my dad bentleys"
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speaking of ptsd and ADI--- they have passed all kinds of rules abotu dealing with vets with ptsd---including we need to have a mental health person on staff-- who is trained ...and keep records ..... and do this and that.----blah blah blah. if we have to do all that , we simply can not train dogs.... i can not imagine the expense of hiring a mental health person to be here when a veteran is around. and what would that person do in the meantime... pick poo and fold laundry??? what this means to us is that we could not take any vet who puts that Dx down... we are specifically a balance dog outfit---.it seems to me that 87.8% of vets who have had body parts altered, including their inner ear balance parts... also have PTSD -- but we must cross that off all applicants. so we don't have a psychiatrist folding laundry in the basement.. somehow... we haave ?dozens? of dogs with people who seem to be ddoing much better with our dogs-- we will have to adjust our paperwork to meet ADI rulings.
and then there was scott--- arrived on our doorstep--- to say he was a mess... is to put it mildly--. scott was so bad that the board of directors hd me do a cory check on him -- which i had never heard of before...hhistlry of arrests, suicide,,jail.. drinking---- you name it-- but he hung arond SDP bit.. and one of the dogs "dash".... liked him.. and he was sober at SDP---- believe me... i know more abotu alcohol than anyone needs to know... however dash liked him... so i decided to take a chance-- and keep track- almost daily of scott..and dash... for quite a while.
the result is ... he is doing a good job now... believe me i was worried... plus he cost us $99 for the cory report-- ( i made him pay me back for that one )----- his is a well done video https://mountainlake.org/vch-turning-a-mess-into-a-message
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now to work on ours....
