Scout’s training has been slowly progressing and we’re finding it helpful in general. He now knows:

  • sit
  • (lay) down
  • spot (as in, “go to your spot” / place training)
  • paw / other paw
  • stay
  • recall is getting pretty strong (come)
  • starting to get the hang of leash walking

We recently started working with a professional trainer with him. He helped us with paw, strengthening stay, recall, and leash walking so far. The trainer has been great for giving us tips on how to simulate distraction and how to somewhat communicate with him and show him what we’re trying to get him to do.

Leash walking really just started this past week but the weather was not very cooperative, so there’s still work to do there. He seems to be getting it, and by it I mean not pulling and staying by us, but definitely still needs work. We’re not looking for a perfect heel from him, mostly just don’t want him to pull us everywhere he wants to go.

We do struggle with getting his attention back on us at times. I think some of that has to do with one of the challenges we’ve been having with diet … Don’t think I mentioned before, but one of the challenges has been that he’s had to be on a pretty restrictive diet because he kept having some … digestive problems.

We think this is from him eating some stuff in the yard, even though we fight hard to keep things out of his mouth. So we really only have his “normal” kibble (prescribed high fiber diet) to treat him with, no real “high-value” treats. We’re not allowed to give him anything other than the kibble. We’ve started slowly reintroducing new things, roughly once a week – which we’re doing because the vet wants to rule out food allergy.

We’ve started with carrots being reintroduced because we freeze whole carrots to give him. They seemed like a safe introduction, and freezing them helps soothe teething. Those have gone well this week. He just had his last vaccine booster, so we’re giving it a day or two and then we’re going to ty to reintroduce his yak cheese chew since he seemed to really like it and it’s something he can really gnaw on. After that, we’ll have a couple options for letting him chew and help his teeth out and maybe we can try to find a good high value treat next is my thinking.

We’re getting there …

Puppy photo tax (this is from his first snow):