Happy Friday!

I had the best day today. It was filled with dogs, of course, and awesome caregivers.

I started this morning at The Fairway, which is one of the areas I'm focusing in. Kathy was working there, who I believe I've mentioned a few times before. The first thing I did was take Thomas out for a potty break. Thomas is a one year old chihuahua who resides in the kitchen at The Fairway. They've tried having him live in several different runs but he doesn't get along too well with other dogs. He's sweet as can be though.

Billy Bob

When Thomas and I got back, it was time to pick up the breakfast bowls and then wash them.  After that, I cleaned out the indoor part of some of the runs. You would not believe how much sand the dogs track in! The runs looked (and smelled) much nicer after cleaning. That took up most of the morning and then I had the last half hour to socialize. I believe I also mentioned Mocha before (she's a really shy dog). I think in a previous entry I said I thought she had been adopted because I couldn't find her on the website but that was a mistake (the website isn't always the most updated). Today one of her run mates, Billy Bob, took quite a liking to me. He walked alongside me throughout the run. He's such a friendly dog, but he has some fears that are solely in his head. For example, we have to wear a whistle necklace whenever we're in DogTown and he was fine with the necklace until one point when he was really fearful of it and then was fine again later. Kathy says he has a lot of weird, sudden fears like this.

Look how pretty Mocha is

Mocha was much less shy today, but still very shy. When she saw me petting Billy Bob, she would come over and lick my knee or lick my arm, but was not giving me any signal that she was ready to be pet. She did give me a few tail wags though, and responds to high pitched voices. 

River

The rest of my time I spent working on 'down' and 'shake' with River. He's very smart. He's a little beside himself currently because his run mate, Sophie, got adopted yesterday and they were the only two in their run.









My afternoon shift was spent in the Deja Lodges. The Lodges are unlike anywhere else in DogTown. Most of the dogs that live here are red collar, so I can't interact with them, but it provides the perfect environment to study dog body language. This is the place I was waiting for! Here you find the most extreme behaviors and several bite history dogs. A lot of these dogs are just very scared and/or lack confidence. One of the caregivers, Josh, did an awesome job of showing me around the Lodges. Josh has been watching dogs since he was 10 years old, but in the last 6 years he really got into training. The way Josh looks at training is similar to the way the trainer Huck (an incredible trainer that works at Best Friends) looks at training, which is from more of a behavior standpoint rather than a training standpoint (less clicker training, more body language. reading). Most commonly, behavior modifications take a long time but Huck has a way of speeding up the process, but also so it lasts. I'm really hoping I can shadow Huck for a day to see him work his magic. Anyways, Josh would go into a run and walk me through the dogs and his movements. Or we'd go up to a run, a dog would react (a lor of them are dog aggressive and stranger aggressive) and he'd ask me what signs I saw from the dogs and what they meant. I learned so, so, sooo much today. I didn't have a chance to put the Deja Lodges on my schedule for next week, so I'm hoping the week after next I can go there and learn a ton more. I also met (well, not interacted with) some of the Vicktory dogs, which were Michael Vick's fighting dogs. Many of them have been adopted out, but there are still several at Best Friends.
While the Lodges is great for learning, it's also sad because these dogs can't have much human contact, other than with specific caregivers. It is nice to know, however, that those specific people are working with the dogs to get them to be much less reactive. There was one dog, Jericho, who Josh had me approach (not in person, I was on the other side of his kennel door). Jericho started by barking very loudly at me, kind of showing his teeth, and jumping up against the kennel door. That is his way of trying to get people to leave, but I didn't back down. I continued to stand there and the jumping stopped and his barking got quieter and less frequent. After a while, he stopped altogether. When Josh first started working with Jericho on this, it would take him much, much longer to realize the person in front of him wasn't a threat and wasn't going to do anything to him. Jericho is a dog who is aggressive out of fear, but that fear has gotten less and less with his training.
I really learned so much today and I can't wait to go back.

After Deja, we had our weekly intern reflection meeting. I always get a lot out of these meetings it's nice to...reflect...on our past week.

To finish off my day at Best Friends, I went and volunteered with the Colorado City cats again. They seem healthier than last week and I hope they'll be able to be mixed in with the general cat population soon. There's still 9 of them.

Tomorrow the other interns and I are going to Zion National Park. I'm really excited, but the trail we may end up doing is not supposed to be "people with fears of heights" friendly, so I'm actually pretty nervous about it...we'll see though.