Penny the dog works on the basket trick

Mitch and Molly said, on my post about kitchen training of the basket trick, that their mum is thinking of teaching them to 'hold'.

I was really glad to get that comment, because I'd been scratching my head about where to go next with the trick. (We got the idea from Ludo.)

So I'm reminding Penny of the 'hold' behaviour, which she hasn't done for months. She used to know how to hold a toy, but has never done it with a basket, so I didn't expect too much of her. She only had to mouth the handle of the basket at this stage. (Apologies for my loud voice. I do get a bit excited when Penny shows me how smart she is!)

doing nothing day after day

Penny's been surprisingly calm about her quiet, boring days while we wait for her leg to be x-rayed and manipulated. Tomorrow, thank goodness! Most of the day she just lies around, not even sitting at the door to look out for visitors. I don't know if this is because it's painful to get up, or whether she's just resigned herself to boredom.



As well as playing with Nina Ottosson toys for interest, we thought it might be good for her to practise some stationary tricks. One that we've never conquered is "hold", so we've been working on that one. As long as there's food treats available, Penny will work at it, so we did about four ten-minute sessions today and basically conquered it. Here's an excerpt of the sessions.
(Until I looked at this clip, I didn't realise how much she was moving around. I hope I haven't done her any harm by not making her rest completely. It seems impossible to lie around every minute, but I do realise that if she has an operation she may have to do exactly that for a couple of weeks.)