Boldness Training for Shyla

Shyla has become so very comfortable with the natural world. She happily explores boulders, water, forests, and almost everything imaginable in nature.

I suspect that her comfort in the natural world is a result of how much time she and I spend there. Over years, she's learned that she can have a ton of fun in these quiet places. She forgets all her qualms when it's time to leap into a lake.

And she reaches out to land in the dark water without a worry. Of course, this is partly in the genes of a Lab...

Shyla and I have continued our "silly training", where I try to present her with novel human-made setups to explore. The general idea is that she will (hopefully) become less wary of the huge variety of unknown objects and sounds if we play games where she is rewarded for boldly interacting with them.

One form of "silly" training that I thought of was to give Shyla a ride in a wheelbarrow. The first problem was how she would get into the wheelbarrow. It was high off the ground, and then the wheelbarrow was intimidatingly deep for Shyla to step into.

I realized that Shyla is comfortable with ramps so I set one up for her to climb up to the wheelbarrow. Then, I partially filled the wheelbarrow with wood so that the depth of the wheelbarrow wouldn't intimidate Shyla. She had to step only about a foot downward to get into the wheelbarrow.

I made a video of the different phases of training, from the first time she saw the ramp up to the wheelbarrow to when she could walk up the ramp and step into the wheelbarrow with little worry.

After all of that preparation, Shyla was not the slightest bit afraid when we finally rolled the wheelbarrow with her in it. There's no video of that because it was a total "non-event". I was thrilled to see her newfound boldness!