I recorded a podcast with @Ben Sweet from the Truffle Dog Club and I think you'll all really enjoy it. In this podcast we discuss truffle hunting and how to get started with training your dog. Ben Sweet is a certified dog trainer and scentwork specialist. He hosts the Truffle Forager Podcast and is co-founder of the UK Truffle Festival and Truffle Dog Championships.

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Today, we continued to work on creating an activation behaviour in toy play. I’d like something more intense/pushy than eye contact, but not necessarily a bark, so I’ve been experimenting with play styles to see what Kairo offers. Anticipation building or, as @Nick Benger called it, the Gollum routine is our most successful strategy so far. I had a back up toy for swaps, but Kairo remained engaged and nearby the whole time. Her toy play is gradually improving, so we will get there eventually!

Putting into practise our reactivity training today - omg! Mega WinnyMcWinface. I am really pleased with a) my confidence in being able to interrupt the barking and 2) How quickly she has learned it's not appropriate! I bumped into the neighbour with his spaniel and Aster responded to me really well, even with the Spaniel getting very close. I was so laser focussed I felt borderline rude as he was talking away to me asking how my Christmas was and I was just training 😂🙈I did explain though, and I have asked if he will do some sessions using his dog which he agreed to so I have at least one not-remotely interested-in-dog-training person to bore to death with drills now. I was so excited I message Nick straight away 😂 I got the bug from there and continued my horrifically non-productive day at work by sneaking off to the park in Launceston in pursuit of dogs. It didn't disappoint, there was a nice handful there in the distance so we did some more drills and Aster was very good. She did have a good bark at one dog running after a ball but I interrupted much quicker and more clearly. She was just on her flat collar and a flexi! We still have a way to go with disengaging quicker and holding that focus on me more strongly. The insecurity gets to her and she has to stare at the other dog which will bring on the barking if it's too close or moving towards us so I am really breaking that off and having her come to me while I run backwards so we get some distance, back into middle and look at the dog (with no barking) followed by look at me. At one point a cockadoodledoo thing ran high speed for it's ball at distance from us but parallel to us - it was enough to surprise Aster and made her jump but rather than bark she looked straight at me <3 good girl. Another huge win was someone coming back to the car park past us with their spaniel - I moved onto the grass for some space and put Aster in a sit front and had her look at me the whole time. She didn't break once! I notice she really struggles with focussed heeling in more novel areas as she is in high vigilance mode and cannot contact heel whilst walking forwards AT ALL. All good information for me to mend the holes in our training. Dinnertime was mixing up contact heeling with sit fronts and focussed heeling around the bowl as she has patterned a lot of the drills we've been doing over winter. She was really confused about the sit fronts to begin with!

Started to tackle the first few training goals of the year, snow and all. Prevent jumping at strangers The first thing we're doing is picking LAT training back up in busy areas, which means she's back on the longline/flexi for some walks round busy parks. I've combined this with the clicker initially. The other part is being a bit more aware and responsible as an owner when she's off lead to prevent her reinforcing the behaviour. I'm always vigilant of other dogs and owners but I'm being extra careful to call her in when I think there's a chance of her going to say hello. That leads me to... Recall to heel I've not really started too much active training with this yet beyond giving the "heel" cue whenever she gets close after recall. She's suspiciously started doing it automatically sometimes... Lead walking I bought a SWAG headcollar suggested by @Nick Benger, because sometimes I need to walk her somewhere without actively training. The hope is that we can eliminate reinforcing that pulling = forward while we train towards the same thing on lead and collar. The problem we face is that she has a history of pulling on a flat collar, but I don't want to train with a harness and I worry with slip leads that she's damaging her throat when she pulls hard. So my main questions are: - Can I replace her flat collar with a different one, or should I consider any/all of them poisoned? - What other options would people recommend? - Do I just exclusively use the headcollar until a point in time where I can reintroduce the flat collar? Any advice would be welcome!