Owls and Disobedience

My animal adventures did not stop with the aardvark and bugs yesterday.

In the evening I met with friends for dog training (...."practice group 2") at a Central Location for the attendees. We had a good time working with the dogs on our various goals and then had the required pizza afterwards.

Throughout the evening we had sightings with a pair of owls! I've never seen owls before "in the wild" let alone this close. They continued to fly around the area we were in and make their calls. Note that when he looked at me I moved away....



And onto disobedience. If we go back to our 3 reasons for non-compliance:

- Learner is physically or mentally unable to do the task.
- Learner does not understand
- Learner is not sufficiently motivated

We can look at the piece of "physically unable to do the task" and "not sufficiently motivated".

Griffin's foot was not swollen but it was still causing some discomfort by the evening. He would not sit and he would Down but lean way to the other side. So I stopped asking for those behaviors. But I do have to say it was cute.

Griffin would stare at me and watch and watch and watch. I would cue Sit. And he would shuffle his feet. I tried 3-5 times throughout the evening and every time he did the shuffle. He didn't move away or stand and stare, he gave a shuffle of "I know you want behavior, but it hurts!". It was really neat to see he had such an understanding of cue-response and that he would give an attempt he knew was incorrect. I never fed those attempts yet he continued to offer the same shuffle to the "sit!"