Sizzling Summer Days

Today was WAY too hot to do much of anything. Most of the day my dogs lounged in their crates (I had to take any bedding out or they would overheat!) This is what that looked like...

Jazz thought it was HI-larious when he kicked Seven out of his crate..."HAHAHAHA! phew, I crack myself up!"

"No, seriously...why does the one-ball-wonder get a bigger crate than moi?"

I did get a quick training session in with Seven when a small patch of shade apppeared in the yard. We started a little body-awareness excersize of putting different sets of paws into a bowl. Typical of an 11 week old puppy, Seven is marginally aware that he has 2 front legs and that he needs to control them, but he is completely ignorant to the fact that he also has two BACK legs and that they can move independantly of his fronts. We started off easy with me just clicking him for putting his front feet into the bowl and once this is on cue I will start with the backs. I figure I'll call his front feet "paws" and his back "feet" which could come in handy later down the road.

Cooper is hitting a little roadblock with our latest project: blowing bubbles with his nose in a bowl of water. I've seen a number of people take on this challenge and post their results on youtube so I thought I'd give it a try. He is pretty solid on his nose touch on the base of the bowl with the additional criteria of duration (before this, any nose targetting I had him doing was hard, repeated touches) but when I add the water he is psyching himself out a bit. I have to add more water than I'd like because if I just add a bit he laps it up and then proceeds to perfectly touch the now dry bottom. He "stalls out" frequently if I raise his criteria and just can't seem to get past a light touch to the top of the water. I will continue to work on this and post his results...if we ever get any!