Day 3... Continued

Can an old dog be taught new tricks? The answer appears to be yes.

Over the past few days, we started to get Sadie to respond to commands. She now does "sit" and "down" on command nearly every time. Every so often, she tries to resist the down command and sits instead but we don't praise her until she gets all the way to the ground. It is taking her less time to sit and go down now, although it looks like she's a bit stiff getting into position.

On our walk, we also decided to do some role playing. Earlier in the day, Coco and Sadie were playing a bit on the side yard and Sadie is clearly the "dominant" one. Coco would nip at Sadie for a while until Sadie finnaly got Coco to roll over showing her dominance. During our walk, Cindy and I intentionally made Sadie walk behind Coco and I kept Sadie firmly by my side with her new training collar which. We didn't realize how much the pack mentality had changed until tonight when Sadie would roll over onto her back repeatedly while playing with Coco.

Sadie has graciously stepped down from her position as pack leader for the day, but will this trend continue?

We'll keep track of some of Sadie's commands and how she's doing:

Sit - does this very well!
Down - does this most of the time. She forgets every so often, or tries to resist. She gets into position more quickly on Day 3
Paw - she normally responds to this
Other paw - I think this is a new trick for her, but she picked it up pretty quickly. I still have to pick up her paw every once in a while.
Stand - She seems to like this one, but we're just trying it out. We say "stand" and pat our thighs and she normally hops up on her hind legs.
Come - She's starting to do this on our terms. Before, she would stare at us, or ignore us. Every so often, she would seek shelter under a table or chair...