Left: one of our two new Pittie neighbors! Right: our space is starting to look cozy with plants!

Commercial indoors spaces!

Chai and I started getting used to indoors spaces today: we entered and exited several small stores that allowed me to bring her in, and I carried her through Office Depot and walked her through the Walmart mall corridor (without asking permission; by the time they kicked us out, we had almost made it through the entire corridor).

In the course of our store-outing, we took Chai’s first elevator. The first journey was up. She walked in and rode the elevator without issues and walked out confidently again. Going down, however, she got her tail caught in the elevator door and startled. Bad, bad experience! She hurried out as fast as she could. We are going to spend the next few days trying to counter this experience with good ones!

Left: a clothing store we got permission to explore. Right: in the elevator – before the scary experience!

People socializing continued

Chai voluntarily approached and was fed by 6 strangers today, 2 of whom were kids. She is feeling better and better about strangers – even the ones who are reaching for her from above out of the blue!

UNAM

Game and Chai went to Las Islas again – lots of UNAM campus freedom, running and exploring, meeting people and dogs!

UNAM: chasing Game to who plays with balls, not minding people and meeting her first Xolo!

Videoing clicker games for a future project!

We continued working on a little project we started a while ago: a platform game that’s meant to teach cue discrimination and location specific marker cues to dogs and an introduction to shaping and luring as well as clear, clean mechanics to handlers – all within a single, increasingly complex platform game. Both Game and Chai get to play as we are building more and more complexity into it. Our platform these days? My suitcase. Lots of shaping fun for little Chai today!

One of the reasons I’m not placing Chai yet? I need her as a demo dog for my suitcase videos!

Housetraining

I’m introducing the shower as Chai’s peeing and pooping spot indoors. I use it as a supersized indoors crate and only let her into the rest of the living space when she has either done her business outside or in the bathroom. So far so good!