A Long Walk and a Giant Leap

I hate to state the obvious, but practice makes perfect things really good.  No one and nothing can be perfect, but with hard work and constant practice, things go in the right direction.

As I wrote before, I get nervous leash walking with Ray even though he is generally good.  The part aside from the 'generally good' is what worries me.  When he gets too tired or too stimulated things degenerate to where I just want to run away from him and hide or lob him  into tomorrow or something like that.  It's still way better than before when he was just a three month old jumping shark mouth attached to a springy body. 

Sometimes it takes a determined refocus for me to get back to the basics.  One, we need to practice and train every day, even if it is just squeezing in a few basic commands in the morning and brushing up on rusty skills.  I've been making  a concious effort of having  Ray sit to have his leash attached and using every leash walk as a training opportunity.  That one is hard since all of his outside interactions have to be on leash while the yard is torn up and the fence is down. 

On today's walk, we did really well in that there was minimal pulling and he refocused and checked in often. 

That leash looks taut, but wasn't...yay!





He even went out with Asia and she said he did wonderfully well.  That gave me so much confidence that we went out for an evening walk nearby.  The traffic stimulated him enough that I turned it into a walk around the block, but even so he did really well.  Go Ray! 

Now tonight he did something I've never seen him do before...he left the room I was in and went to lay down by himself.

We will definitely be incorporating more walks into our daily routine!