SETTLING IN NICELY

Since she had such a big few days, we are just hanging out today and letting her find her feet here. She has done very well and fits in really well with my crew.

We are working on passive house manners behaviors like waiting at the door, soft recalls (meaning just hanging around in general and checking in as opposed to the more formal recall we will teach), learning property boundaries, general polite mannerisms... Nothing specific... as I see it we work on it.

Her only two issues at the moment are:

• Mouthing too hard - I don't want to discourage putting her mouth on things since we want to teach retrieves but we do have to curb the strength behind the bite as she doesn't know when to stop and goes too hard.

• Containment stress - she is not a happy girl if blocked behind a barrier of any sort. In the car, behind the fence, in the crate - she has a powerful set of lungs and will sing the song of her people at full volume for awhile in an attempting to persuade the hoo-man that she will likely die if left there.

Neither of these are in any way worrying and are things I am already seeing improvement in.

Her first night of crating, we had hours of unsettledness, last night was significantly better and hopefully tonight will be better still.

It is about reducing stress in those situations and building value to being in the place they don't want to.

While it is certainly a work in progress, I think in a week or so we will have it most of the way resolved...