Shyla's courage

This little girl continues to astound me. She's sensitive, loving, and incredibly smart (in my unbiased opinion).

After a morning hike in our forest, we headed into town for some training.

First, we met our trainer to walk around a park area, letting Shyla observe children, tennis players, a city bus, bike riders, geese, and all the other odd things that pop up in a town park. Our goal is to reward good and calm reactions to these relatively novel things. We don't want to "put Shyla over threshold" (i.e., get scared) so we tip-toe along a balance beam, gradually bringing her closer to novel things as she's able to handle it with a calm demeanor. My trainer is so good at reading Shyla's body language that she knows just when we've gone far enough. Believe me, we take baby steps each day, especially when it comes to exposure to children, but I'm truly seeing the progress that we're making.

I was thrilled with Shyla's calmness today in a setting that would have been very scary a month ago. So, at the end of our training session, I took her to a dog park with a small lake to let her celebrate. And, I discovered that Shyla has learned to swim very smoothly and efficiently, unlike her first attempts which involved lots of splashing a little forward motion. I wonder if she took secret swimming lessons?

She retrieved tennis balls from the lake.

And shook off water with that crazy look that dogs can get!

Afterwards, I did errands in town. At one point, I parked in front of a big pet store to go into some other nearby stores. When I came back to the car, I saw Shyla intently focused on the dogs who were going in and out of the pet store's automatic doors.

I saw a training opportunity because automatic doors have terrified Shyla in the past. I took her out of the car, and we watched numerous dogs walk through those automatic sliding doors. I gave Shyla treats each time the doors moved, and within minutes, she was doing her "relaxed tail wag" whenever a dog went through the doors. So, I ratcheted up my courage and waited for the next human/dog pair to walk toward the doors. When the next pair appeared, I walked Shyla through the doors right behind them.

She walked through those doors tall and proud, just like I promised she'd do someday! I was so happy to see that our slow and steady approach is working. The human world is becoming more manageable to Shyla each day.

I think that our girl, with this slow and steady approach, will undoubtedly learn that most of the world is a fun place before too long.

On a different note, several of you asked about the smoke plume from Rocky Mountain National Park that I showed yesterday. It's a wildfire of about 1000 acres that's only 30% contained. The good news is that there's snow in the forecast so that should help slow the fire.