Follow the progress of Hunter, an 11 month old lab in training to be a Service Dog for a 4 year old Autisitic boy.

In blogging the day to day training of Hunter, a training job that I consider one of the most important I have ever taken on, in the back of my mind, I am constantly thinking about my blogging angle throughout the day. I have read on line, that thinking about how you will blog an event as it is happening is a one of the many signs of blogging addiction. You almost start to live life in the "blog person". When something happens to us bloggers, we start to think about how we will write about it. The more we blog, the more we think of things in the "blog person".

My point is this. Knowing that what I do with this dog will be read and scrutinized by many has made me very conscious of what I do and where we should be in regards to a training plan. So far my goals have pretty much been met, but Hunter is not ready to move on and I think he will need to continue to work on obedience, and just continue to get out and about ignoring people and pets for some time to come.

I would love to blog aggression cases that I see, especially some of the jobs where I have utilized Finney's help, but you can understand that in our litigious society, people are reluctant to have a written record of such a thing and I have been reluctant to even ask.

Saturday I took Hunter to Shaw's Supermarket for my big weekly food shop and a huge heaping of training. People were very aware that the dog was working and no one tried to pat him although he did have a lot of admirers and everyone who inquired was shocked that he was only 11 months old. He was very calm and well behaved. I find it odd that of all places it was the people in a petstore who had no idea what a working dog did. Today I felt that people looked at me funny, and were probably wondering what mental or physical illness I had, and we made lots of people visibly uncomfortable.

Holding the leash on the handle of shopping cart while I pushed temporality solved the problem of Hunter bumping my leg in heel, but I was so aware that I could run over his toes that it became exhausting after a while. My kids were away for the weekend which gave me more training time today, and I couldn't help but wonder how shopping with a cart will work with Merrill along. We will need to revisit food shopping many times before we get it right I am sure. It was a lot harder than you would think even with the dog cooperating as well as he did. He took one big major air sniff in the deli department, but other than that, food was not an issue for him.
Today's lesson was to teach Hunter that people talking to him was the cue for him to watch me, and Hunter did really well.
Those Labs sure love their food don't they?

Photo credit goes to Merrill's Mom Dagny

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