🎉 Everyone, please welcome our newest addition, Sandy the Goldendoodle! 🐾 She’s a little champion rock star and jumping into her very first Spot lesson! Learning SPOT is going to help her in so many ways — it builds balance, boosts confidence, gets her comfortable with new surfaces, teaches her a front-feet target, and helps her develop rear-end awareness. These foundations are not just fun, they’re hugely beneficial for her future as a service dog! Spot training carries over into a variety of advanced tasks and behaviors she’ll be learning down the road!

Peep the second video for a blooper! I didn’t check to see how many treats I had left before we started (that was our first session but I hadn’t refilled it from yesterday at work) so I ran out 😂🤦🏼‍♀️ Lesson learned- refill prior to training lol. First video was take 2 and he was rocking it! Only did it for attention once which I ignored. Sometimes I talk to myself and/or him as if he understands what I’m saying about me messing up or asking him for one thing when I meant to ask for another 😂 So ignore that lol

We went to Lowe’s with our friend @Ashley Justus and her service dog, Koda this morning! The boys did great! We saw Halloween (and Christmas lol) decorations, saw other dogs, worked around each other, and did some obedience practice! Here’s a few recall practice videos of Atlas, he did great compared to last time I took videos which was at work a few weeks ago.

This was post play session so he was tired but I tried the back up a few steps thing and it definitely helped him come faster! Going to keep practicing!

This was our evening session of Joy’s first day learning “nudge” today! She ROCKED it! She did get a little anticipatory just trying to offer a million behaviors to get food so I had to throw other things she knows in there to make sure she was listening. She didn’t lick at all, just booped with her nose! I assume I shouldn’t add the word “nudge” in for a while (even as “yes! Good nudge”) til she understands this part of the “game”? That’s how I did it with Atlas, we started with no word involved, then added it and then faded it back out as he learned the visual cue.