Ringing The Bell

The dog doesn’t go to the bathroom in the house anymore.   It was simple.  I was just doing it wrong. She stopped going in the house almost overnight once I changed how I was handling taking her out.   She’s fast now too, not sniffing around all over the place.  She’s had a few incidents, but it’s been our fault more so than hers.

The thing I’ve been wanting her to do is let us know when she has to go out.  We started crating her more of the time when we weren’t specifically playing with her or feeding her or if she hadn’t been out in a bit.   She wasn’t overly upset about being in the crate, she’s a puppy and they sleep a lot.   But I still wanted her to be able to go over to the door and communicate in some way that she needed to go out.

I didn’t mind if she wanted to go out to spend time outside (and I think she’d prefer to live out there, honestly).   But she doesn’t bark much.   I got these bells like you’d see on a counter.   An old-fashioned “service bell” she could ring by just stepping on or tapping it.  Only she wasn’t doing that either.

We’d ring the bell before taking her out and try to get her to ring the bell but she wasn’t connecting the bell ringing with the door opening and her getting to go out.   She picked up on so many things so quickly that this one thing surprised me.

Then two nights ago I decided to just put the bell in front of her and train bell for treats.   It took about ten minutes.   She was whacking the bell with her paw and getting treats and thought this new game was lots of fun.   I walked away and she stopped though.   Today we did it again and this time after I walked away she kept ringing the bell.   I’d come back and treat her again.   She did this for a while, watching me return every time to treat her.

Later tonight she went over to the door, rang the bell and I came over, gave her a treat and took her out.   She did that twice and both times got to go out.   Tomorrow I’ll see if she remembers the connection.  

The nice thing about the house training though is we can keep her out of the kennel a lot more.  If she can let us know when she wants to go out with the bell, I think we’ll have the whole house training thing down.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s “freestyle” dance during his school’s Winterfest was caught on a friend’s phone.  He sent the video to us and my husband posted it online to show his Fortnite friends. One lady said, “I don’t know anything about your family, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell which one your son is.”  My husband said not to worry, she’d know.   When my son started breaking into the Fortnite dance moves she just started laughing, saying she should have known.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After six weeks out of school, my daughter started back today.   She wondered who she’d be sitting with at her four-person table in her class.   She came home and the first thing she told me when I asked how her day was was who her new table mates were.   She’s excited to be sitting with different friends this quarter.