Model student

I am long overdue for providing an update on how our training is going and what G’s been learning. So much has happened—namely life—that I’ve fallen behind quite behind on these posts. I feel as though just when there’s something worth sharing, there’s immediately something else that happens that’s equally as noteworthy, so I never get caught up. But that’s just how life works, I guess. 

Since my post from a while ago regarding some of the in-home tasks G was learning to do for me, we’ve greatly expanded upon the types of items that he’s retrieving from the floor for me. In addition to what we had been practicing with before, he’s now picking up objects like my keys, cane, pill bottles, paper napkins, various eating utensils, bags of frozen food, shoes, clothing, and different types of mail from catalogs to postcards. With the exception of the cane, which can be unwieldy for him if he doesn’t grab it in the right spot, everything seems easy and fun for him to do. If we accomplished nothing else together, just this help alone would have been worth all the effort. 

I mentioned before that G is learning to retrieve the phone for me in the case of an emergency. While the phone is on a cellular service, it’s connected to what looks like a standard cordless phone often associated with a land line. We have it set up in our home office and it has a special strap affixed to it to help G carry it around in his mouth. So, why not just train your dog to just get your cell phone, you ask? Because your cell phone could be anywhere. The reason for this particular phone setup is because, by keeping the phone in a fixed location, G will always know where it is to retrieve it when needed. 

I’m in awe/fascinated of the learning process involved with this task. You start by being right next to the phone and say “Phone” and then “Take.” When the dog takes the phone and follows through with the “Bring” and “Give” commands, you praise heavily and reward him with treats. Then you take a few steps away and repeat the process until you get further and further away. Eventually, you should just be able to say “Phone” from anywhere in your house and the dog will know exactly what to do. Within one day of training, G could easily accomplish this task when we were in the line of sight to the office. Within just a few days, we were very successful with this from the family room, living room, and master bedroom. It got a little trickier when we tried it from the kitchen where it seemed like he got confused or lost his bearing as to where he was. But after another week or two of practicing from this specific location, G had an “Aha” moment where everything just clicked. Now, I can be in different parts of the house and say, “Phone” and he will bring it right over to me.

Other tasks that have been introduced include having G help me close the door to the dishwasher and the door from the house into the garage. In both cases, an adaptive strap is attached to the handle so that he can grab it and pull it with his mouth. For the dishwasher, since I can’t bend over to bring the door up when it’s fully extended, G grabs the strap and pulls it up so I can reach it and finish the job. With the house door, the goal is to have G be able to pull it shut behind us as we head out somewhere. The dishwasher took him all of a minute to master. Closing the house door is a little trickier depending on how wide open it is when he starts to pull it close. If it’s not too wide open, it’s a cinch for him. If it’s really wide, open, he sometimes comes at it from the wrong angle and then ends up shutting it with him still inside. The biggest challenge with this task, however, is that when G goes to grab the strap, his paws sometime push the door runner up to the point where the rug gets bunched up preventing me from fully opening the door to get back inside. This is just the nature of having rug that can move, so the plan is to replace the runner with more stiff carpet tiles that can stay relatively stationary. 

Also, during this time, G has learned how to carry a little tote bag for me and to bring it to other people. This helps me transfer light items from room to room. He can also help me take off my slippers. We were trying to teach him how to take shoes and boots off for me, but I decided to halt that since I really didn’t want tooth marks on my nice leather shoes. (Hey, just because I’m disabled doesn’t mean I don’t still want to look fashionable!) It’s all a work in progress to be sure but it’s amazing to me how he just figures things out and how helpful he truly is.