We have been visiting the dog park almost every weekend now that she is fully vaccinated and healthy. She loves the dog park! She runs and plays with all the dogs, and is so exhausted when we get back to the car, which is awesome. Occasionally, we will run into a mean dog, but she will just run to try to get away. When we see it happen, we leash her and take her to another part of the park. I worried about her at first because it was a huge park, and I knew if she ran from me, I would never catch her. But, she is the one who never lets us out of her sight.
She has begun to lose her baby teeth as well! The other day, I had given her a bully stick, and had a bit of a freak put moment when I found blood on it, and on the carpet as well. I looked over her body, and found she had lost one of her larger, back teeth. After cleaning the mess, I later found the tooth on the floor (by stepping on it). As weird as it sounds, I was really excited to find one, so that I could keep it, yay! I think the majority of her teeth are her adult ones by now, she lost 2 of the sharp canine teeth, so now I think we only have the remaining top canines left to go.
We are doing loads better with her chasing the cats. We started training what I call "bad no cat, good no cat". I put a bunch of little treats in a small baby food jar, and pretty much kept it with me at all times. When a cat was walking by, and Amelia would stare at it, I would say "hey" or something similar to get her attention and look at me. When she turned her head to me, I would say "good no cat!" And give her a treat. My theory was that if I can praise her for looking away from the cat, she might see that as a not wanting to look at the cat?
It has been working really well so far. The other day, she was laying on the carpet with a toy, and a cat came up to her. I watched the entire encounter, waiting for Amelia to give chase, but she never did. The cat first started to sniff her tail, then her legs, and slowly sniffed up to her face, but Amelia never moved. When the cat started to walk away, I thew a huge "good no cat" party for her, and gave her an almost handful of treats for that one. I was so proud.
Occasionally, we will still have a "bad no cat", when she will start chasing one, or walk up to the cat, trying to mouth him. When that happens, I will tell her "bad no cat" and lead her into her crate. We only leave her there for about 5 or 10 minutes, then start the process again. We are getting it, bits at a time!
I have been wanting to try and wean her off of the crate at night. So a couple nights ago, we wanted to test her a bit We brought everything we could up off of the floor and out of reach, and closed the bedroom door off. My husband did not want her out at night because he was certain she would have an accident on the floor. My concerns were that she would find something to destroy while I was sleeping. She did a lot of getting on the bed and then getting back off, but eventually, she went into her crate by herself and slept there. We closed the crate up a little while afterwards. Confusing because she will whine for a while after we put her to bed, but she goes and sleeps by herself last night? I don't know.
We are slowly getting it with her. We have had our bad days, and our good days. Lately I feel like we have more good days than bad.
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