Skye's Training Walk (With Abbey)

Today we took Skye and Abbey for a Training Walk in Mahon Point Shopping Centre. We were minding Abbey for the day. I handled Skye and my sister Beth had Abbey.

We took them out of the van when we arrived for a busy busy, and it was lashing. Really heavy rain! We all got sodden. And typically enough, it was the one time I forgot to bring a towel. It was warm inside the shopping centre though and they quickly dried off. Skye was good at working with Abbey around and wasn't distracted which was very good.

We had some lunch at a café. Skye's overall a very easy dog to take places, as she doesn't get fazed, is calm and behaves well, and takes everything in her stride. However, she does find food distracting. She was doing  OK in coffee shops a few months ago but seems to "need a bit more practice"! She was grand, but didn't settle under the table, she stood around hoping to mop up any crumbs. So maybe some training on leave it and settle down might be something to work on and a few more Coffee Shop trips.

Another thing Skye is bad for is trying to pick up any food she sees on the floor. I don't let her get it if I can help it and say "leave it" but she still tries at every opportunity! So again, polishing up the leave it could help here!

She is good now on lead, with hardly any pulling. If she starts to walk too fast or begins to pull I just say "steady" and this seems to remind her.

There was another assistance dog in the shop and Skye was quite keen to go over to say hello, but I managed to encourage her to keep on walking past.

Skye and Abbey at the Ice Rink

There was a temporary Ice rink up for Christmas/January time at the shopping centre and Beth and Caitlin love going Ice Skating so some of the family went there. One of my other sisters Orla, took Abbey and I took Skye into the Ice Rink as we thought it would be a great experience for them. The music in there was very loud, so it must have been really loud for them (as dogs hear 4x louder than humans) and it was also pretty cold but they didn't mind it at all. We only took them in for 10 minutes or so as we got too cold just standing around, it was colder in there than outside!

We took them into a furniture shop as I don't know about Abbey but Skye has never been into one before. It was one of those spotlessly clean shops but they were great and when we went and sat on some of the sofas they knew not to come and try to jump up to sit with us.

I then took them both for a walk and it was again, raining heavily, but I walked them around outside and they did well, no pulling, as sometimes I find when walking two dogs at once they both try to pull to get ahead! (I had been planning to walk them in the fields back home but this morning they were muck spreading so that completely put that out of the question!)

They both went in the back of the car together on the journey home and we didn't hear a peep out of them, they slept the whole way.

Behaving impeccably for a treat!