Giving Permission?
I wasn’t going to film this part of playing with Harvey today. Then he started offering a behavior that I thought was interesting enough that I wanted to share. Every time I stood beside him to do up the cinch he would step over into me.
It seem pretty obvious where the behavior was coming from. We’ve worked a grand total of three times on stepping over to the fence so I can get on. The last time was just when I went to let Rusty out to grazr and stayed to pet Harvey awhile because he was sad about not getting to go out.
He offered to step over, putting me on his right side. We had never worked on that before. It wasn’t too long ago that he wouldn’t let anyone on his right side at all. Now he was offering it to me. I wasn’t going to let him down, I started scratching. Anywhere he wanted. Somehow that ended up being his butt. Amazing how itchy those things are. I scratched and scratched. Then I climbed on the fence and scratched some more.
He was a little nervous at first about me being up high. By the end I was sprawled across his butt still scratching away.
Apparently it was a strong reinforcer. Interesting how it transferred to his other side, on the ground, away from any fences.So I wanted to share him stepping into me asking to be cinched. I waited every time until he did this before touching the cinch again.
Also I had a request for a video showing how I do the cinch up. Since that was what we were working on anyway I thought I would leave it going to show that part too. But to see any of it you’ll have to go to the facebook page. The video is too long to load here 🙁 https://www.facebook.com/309985332692651/videos/487958695021536/