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embarrassed moment leads to lightbulb moment!!!

I've always been a big fan of talking about training because when you talk about it, things come out that you wouldn't have thought about in the beginning.  Now this blog post has taken on a totally new light since I started writing it 20 minutes ago.  I'm leaving the original post below in italics.
Riley - Black Standard Poodle

I'm not talking a little, I'm talking completely flushed and sweating I was so embarrassed!!!  So Riley is my new prospect.  She will be 6 months old tomorrow, I quit working her out in public for more than a short period at a time because she was just not handling her food well, she was allergic to chicken and I didn't realize it at first.  I was having a hard time getting her potty trained at home because of it and didn't want to risk an accident out in public because she had already had one.  
Kiera in the red vest, getting ready to do a recall past another dog (Riley)

 Well last night I took her to work with another student of mine Kiera.  Y'all this girl is going to challenge me until I change everything about how I train, or I pull out every last hair on my head.  Now I know she was probably feeding off of me because I was nervous having her out anyway, and I had a headache so I was a little off my game.  This girl for one is afraid of other dogs, I don't know if she has picked that up from Yadi or something that happened before I brought her home.  

 We get past her barking at Kiera at first and then we start to work on Kiera's lesson, she is amazing and she and her handler do beautiful together!!  So we start to head down to Target.  Riley gives me no warning at all and just pees as she is walking...  

 I'm like what?????   You have to be kidding me...  

 Clean that mess up and then continue on get to Target to work on ignoring food for Kiera and Riley just relaxing and being a distraction.  Before we could even get started there she pooped in the middle of the main isle.  OMG Riley!!!!   Now my student says...  I love how you even gave her a chance to go potty and she just stood there and looked at you.   Guys I wanted to crawl into a whole and hide, but this customer walking by as I was cleaning everything up says "did we have an accident?  Well it happens to all of us sometimes."  That made me feel a tiny bit better and then my student's mom says "you make me feel normal" and that made me feel better.  

 I guess the take away from this is that we are dealing with dog's they are not perfect, they are not robots, I am going to take this a yet another learning experience with her and make sure that if we are going to work in public I take her out on leash to potty before going anywhere, and I'm going to work on teaching her to paw target my foot when she needs to go out to go potty instead of barking at me.

It was upon typing that last sentence it hit me, I did this to myself.  I took away my pups potty alert without teaching her a new one first!  Talk about a face palm moment.  Her cue to go potty was to bark at me, and since I have been correcting her for barking in public... when we are in public she doesn't know how to let me know that she has to go potty.

I know I will get a lot of flack for this post from people that will say I have no business taking my pup out to train if she is going to have potty accidents in public.  Believe me, it's not something I want to have happen, but it did and if someone else can learn something from my mistake then I'll take the flack for it.

Happy Training!!


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