Xana is a really smart bitch. She observes us very closely and has already found out who is better for playing and who is better for resting. She always follows the dog-kid when she wants to play wildly and when she needs to rest or take a break, she lays on my shoes. I still use some cozy plastic shoes that are quite old.
At the beginning, however, Xana qualified them as the perfect bite object and for the first few days I always watched her with suspicion when she approached them. Now she just lies down on top of them and only tries to nib rarely.
To teach important commends in a playful way
Today the dog-kid wanted to teach Xana the commend "come as "Sit down" worked well. The first 5-minute session of the day went well.
At first Xana didn't understand what we wanted from her. She sat down staring at us with her cute puppy eyes and waited for praise, but we moved away from her. She stared at us in a confused way, came closer and sat down right in front of us again. There was a treat right away. With the treats it worked really well. She was just too crazy about these tasty rewards!
Of course, we can't give her an infinite number of these tasty square things, but it's an easy way to get positive rewards in her brain associated with carrying out commands.
As a child we had a dachshund and at that time I didn't know about the positive conditioning with treats and to be honest ... He was a really nice and calm dog, but he didn't listen to us well. But it was even more important for a Border Collie which is a bigger and more lively dog.
A last training-session at night
Before we go to sleep, we let Xana play outside for half an hour and always hope that she will do her business successfully. Since she was relatively calm and balanced, the dog-kid was able to do an evening training session with her, which went wonderfully again. Little Border Collie puppies are as it is written on the Internet, super bright and need both exercise and intelligent tasks to be satisfied.
