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PAWS, 381 West Hospital Drive, Orofino, ID (2026)

08/10/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK FIVE)
SPOT
Throughout this week, we have continued to push duration and distance in Spot’s basic commands. He now performs the down command efficiently without lures and is eager to hold the position until he is commanded to break or otherwise commanded to sit or stand. Lately he has been challenging us with sitting from a down. We have made the down position highly rewarding, therefore he builds up lots of anticipation and offers the behavior all the time. When sitting him from a down, we have been commanding him “sit” with both our verbal and non-verbal cues as we take a step in towards him taking his space so that he sits. Once he is in the sit position we then offer him lots of food reward and physical praise. Just like shaping the down, we now have to take a step back and highly reward Spot for sitting from a down in order to help create eagerness and drive to do so. Spot’s recalls continue to be great, although he could still use some work when he is off lead and at a distance focused on something else. He has a solid stand and will happily be inspected by other handlers as he receives a food reward. Our goal is to be able to completely remove the food reward by the time he leaves in order for him to be able to be handled all over without being lured into doing so. Spot continues to excel greatly and has such an amazing personality. We also continue to work on dog on do approaches in random areas throughout the days as well as having people approach each handler while Spot is sitting patiently in a heel waiting to be pet without breaking from position.

08/10/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK FIVE)
AGGIE
This week we have been working primarily on Aggie’s duration in distracting environments. We have done this by bringing Aggie into areas with large amounts of foot traffic and loud noises. At first she didn’t do very well. She always wanted to leave the command and either stand next to us, or go check out some of the different noises or people. As the week progressed she still shows much interest in these things, but she is far more reliable in staying where we tell her to stay. Aggie is very food motivated, so by using her treats as a reward anytime she increased the amount of time that she stayed in command, we were able to significantly increase her duration. We have also been working on Aggie with her harness training. Aggie seems to be a bit shy having things being put over her head, this includes her collar and her harness. She pulls her head away and turns her back on us, or just backs into the corner of the room. We are working on this by pairing the harness with her absolute favorite treat, milk bones. Any time we put the harness on, we use a portion of a milkbone to lure her through the headpiece of the harness, and then she gets the treat. By doing this we are hoping to pair the harness with a positive for her so that she starts to see the harness as a positive thing, not an unsure thing.
Aggie is still having a great time here. At least once a day after her bathroom break, Aggie gets the zoomies and loves to run back and forth to you, which usually just leads her to try to nibble at your feet until you tell her to stop. We all believed at first that Aggies favorite toys were ball and frisbee’s because of how much she loves playing fetch. But after this week we have found that her true favorite thing is the hose / sprinkler. She will ignore everything for the chance to chase after that stream of water.

08/05/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK FOUR)

Aggie is officially done with the first half of her training. This means she is past the beginning learning stages of her training! So this week we have begun working on her generalization training. Generalization training means that we are trying to get her to a comfortable and consistent in performing her commands anywhere, under any circumstances, with anybody. This is the most important aspect of her training as it will allow her to transition well in her new home, and maintain her obedience even in new environments. To do this we have been working with her in highly distracting environments. For instance, when we are receiving our food orders for the week we will have her sit next to us in the busy and noisy day room while they hand it out. This teaches her that even when there are tons of people around and lots of distractions, she still needs to stay with us until we release her. Another environment is taking her outside while people are jogging on the track. This is extremely hard for her right now because she wants to run with the person and will try to grab their shorts if we are not careful. To work past this behavior I have asked several trainers to run around the track while she is off lead. I have given each trainer a small sq**rt bottle filled with water, and anytime she tries to jump up or grab onto them in any way, she gets a quick sq**rt and a verbal “No”. When she runs calmly next to one of them or if she shows interest and then returns to me she gets rewarded with treats and praise for a positive behavior. One of the areas that Aggie is struggling with is her duration and distance. We noticed in one of our training circles that about half the time we would stay and leave her, she would end up breaking and try to follow us if we walked away without looking back. Then the other half, she would come running as soon as we said her name, instead of waiting for the command. In order to fix this we have been working on shortening the distance and rewarding success. Then we increase the distance little by little until we can walk the desired distance without her breaking. We have also been working on clarifying that her name doesn’t mean “Come”. This is done in a similar way. We start in front of her with her in a sit. We say her name and if she remains in position we mark her with “Good” and then give her a treat. We then take one step back and repeat the process. Before long, we are able to stand about 20 feet away and jump around and holler like crazy and she will stay until given the command to “Come”.

08/05/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK FOUR)

This week has been excellent for Spot! We’ve been putting in lots of work on his duration commands, sit stays, and downs. Over the course of this week, Spot has improved greatly in his down with both verbal and non-verbal ques. I would say the only thing we really struggled with this week was beating the heat and finding times to work outside where he wasn’t getting overheated and checked out within five minutes. During our training circles we did many CGC’s 1,2&3’s which is where the dog will sit at your side while in a heel as someone comes to approach you and shake your hand all while your dog doesn’t break from the sit command in excitement, fear, or aggression when the person walks up. The second part of the CGC is the person engages in a natural conversation with you as they ignore your dog. During this time the dog should be calm and continuing to sit in the heel position. After a short period of time the person then asks the handler if he may pet your dog. In doing so, the person gets down on the dogs level and calmly pets the dog, again, without the dog breaking. The person will then stand up and walk away as you reward and highly engage with your dog. The third part of the CGC is standing your dog for inspection. This has been fairly simple to teach Spot as he is super food motivated so when feeding him he can ignore a lot of stimuli around him. During this, we will command the dog to stand (on all fours) either from a down or a sit. Once the dog has stood, we will stay and leave him stepping out in front of him. The dog should not take a step forward or backward once the command has been given and should be able to stand under pressures applied to him. We will the start feeding the dog keeping him focused while desensitizing him to the new situation. While the dog is in a stand, a volunteer will come forward and inspect the dog. During this process, the volunteer checks the dogs teeth, eyes, ears, puts pressure on the dogs back with their hands, examines the dogs tail and all four legs/paws. This desensitizes the dog to being examined by a groomer or vet with good manners and high tolerances to uncomfortable situations. We also worked on recalling our dogs to us through crowds of people which was super successful for both Aggie and Spot given distances and durations. Overall, Spot is doing incredible in our program and has benefited so well from being here. His work has definitely shown itself this week!

07/27/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK THREE)
SPOT
Spot has started to become everyone’s favorite dog who has come through the program or been at Givens Hall (competing with Aggie)! This week we continued to work lots on our socialization skills around people in different environments. Spot goes absolutely crazy to see anybody that walks by and in those moments he lets all of his obedience training out the window, so it has definitely been a challenge and a constant work in progress getting spot to sit patiently before being released to go so hi. Although this is something we still work on daily and every time we take him out, we are seeing bits of progress in the way we let him act when approaching new or familiar faces. This week we also introduced spot and Aggie! We started with close proximity; walking both dogs near each other as we kept them engaged on us doing normal obedience commands, not allowing them to focus too much on one another. At first they were both a little stiff, but with some encouragement they shook it off and tried playing. Since their first introduction, Spot and Aggie have played so well and continue to tease and chase each other all over the place!
This week we continued to work on the down command with Spot. He acts very stubborn at times and will completely ignore the command and the lure but continue to do everything else on point. To work on this issue, I have been having the team continue to lure spot into a down and highly reward the position while telling Spot “down” or “good down”. This associates the verbal “down” with our lure. Overtime, the verbal command “down” will be enough for Spot to respond to as we introduce our non-verbal (hand signal) for down. I am also having the team make the down position the most rewarding when working. In this case, he will still be rewarded for heeling, sits, sit stays, come abouts, and recalls. The difference is he will be rewarded less in those commands and we will show him much more attention, reward, and excitement for the down position. Spot continues to excel so greatly in all of his basic obedience stages thus far. He is also doing amazing in his kennel since I started bowl feeding him in there and every time we come in he is eager to go right in, turn around and sit facing the door patiently, and wait until I set his bowl of food in!

07/27/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK THREE)
AGGIE
Aggies obedience training is going exceptionally. She is a very attentive girl and loves when we go out to do our training. She is doing well with all of her commands and is able to reliably perform distance sits and downs. We have been slowly working on off lead training to test her impulse control around other people. Aside from high energy environments, Aggie has done well with staying at your side with minimal engagement. We now play a little game called “Go say hi”, where we will walk around the institution and I will point at random people and tell her to go say hi. She runs up to them, gets some pets and then comes back until I point at the next person. It is not just people that Aggie is making friends with now though. She has made a new friend with Spot, the other dog at our facility. We began getting these two used to each other by spending some time working with them both in close proximity to one another. After a few minutes with no negative reactions we decided to allow them to go up sniff one another. There was a moment of hesitation but soon they were both play bowing and prancing around each other.
Aggie has been struggling with trying to play tug with her lead. She does well most of the time, but when she gets the zoomies, or we try to jog together she can’t help but to bite at it. As of right now we have been able to stop her in the act by simply slowing down and saying No, but we are going to work on a more permanent fix over the next few days. We have noticed she only tries to bite at it when it is dangling in front of her, so by beginning her harness training we should be able to eliminate the temptation just from the placement of the lead.
Aggie continues to brighten our days here with her constant affection and silly antics. She had a fun water adventure this week that involved some confusion with her reflection in the pool. She was convinced another dog was in the water and kept bouncing around and barking at her reflection. It wasn’t until she bounced into the water that she learned she was mistaken.

07/20/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK TWO)
SPOT
Since our last update, we have been able to bond with Spot a lot more and really acclimate him to his new surroundings. Spot has been terrific since his arrival! This dog is one of the happiest go, go, go boys we have had in a long time! One of spots favorite things besides playtimes are his social interactions with people! Spot is a massive lover and greets everyone as if they are his owners which brings us to our first issue. We are having a problem with Spot’s greeting behaviors and he likes to act like a little puppy and jump up onto people or get right in their faces and start licking. To some, these behaviors are cute but in an obedience world they are unacceptable ways to greet friendly strangers. This is a lack of Spot’s impulse control mixed with high energy which makes a great training opportunity. What we have been working on to correct this behavior is sitting Spot at our sides in the “heel” position. We will maintain Spot’s focus and reward him as he is calm and attentive. When Spot is calm we will give him the high valued reward he is after which is the pets and affection from people. After a few seconds of good, calm behavior we will release Spot and let him go say hi to people. In the case that he jumps or starts taking peoples personal space by licking their faces, we will correct him with our “no” marker and take him away. The marker has to come as soon as his actions take place. Overtime, the dog starts to understand that when he jumps or gets overly excited he will lose the reward of being pet. Spot is a very quick learner so this process has been easy to work on, and he has already made incredible changes! We have also continued to work on Spot’s kennel behaviors. He is always relaxed once he is in his kennel, but getting him to go in is the tricky part. I had him going in with a little bit of pressure the first few days, but then he started to regress and make it difficult to kennel him up. To work on this I tried high value treats, tossing kibble in, his favorite toys, as well as peanut butter stuffed kongs. Spot catches onto my games quickly, so instead I started to bowl feed him small portions inside his kennel throughout the day. I have a bowl on top of his kennel and when we come inside I will take a handful of kibble out of my training pouch, put it in the bowl, and make him sit and stay a few feet away from his kennel. I put the bowl in the back of his kennel and once I get his eye contact I tell him “kennel” and he will run right in as happy as can be! This has made the training experience so much easier as well as built eagerness in Spot to want to enter his kennel without is having to imply our own bodies to get him in. Spot continues to excel in his basic obedience training! We are working on recalling him when he is off in the yard doing his own thing which needs a ton more charging, sit stays, and this week we introduced down which we will have a video update on next week.

07/20/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK TWO)
AGGIE
Aggie is progressing very well in her training here. She has shown a strong understanding of basic commands and is able to do well on leash without pulling. Aggie does have some issues in highly stimulating environments and around new people. She has a strong urge to pull to these new things. In order to address this we are slowly building up her threshold by regularly working her around smaller crowds of people. As the weeks go on we will work with larger and larger crowds to build up her comfort level. Aggie has had a lot of success in transitioning to verbal only commands. After roughly 2 or 3 training sessions she has been reliably pairing the command word with the action.
Aggie is struggling with her play. She loves to play fetch and tug, but unless you have another toy to trade with, she refuses to relinquish the toy. To address this we have been working with high value treats (biscuits seem to be her favorite). We play for a short time then offer the treat as a trade. When she lets go we mark it with “Good”, give her the treat, then immediately release her with “yes” and give the toy back. The point of this is to show her it is more rewarding to give us the toy then to keep it as well as making her realize she isn’t losing it forever. Hopefully over the next couple weeks this will transition into us simply saying “Give” and her releasing the toy.
Outside of training Aggie is the cutest bundle of fun! She was able to entertain herself and us this week when she seemed to discover her tail for the first time and spent a good 5 minutes trying to catch up to it. With the way she rubs up against your legs and hugs her body into you I am convinced she must be part cat.

07/13/2026

WEEKLY SUMMARY (WEEK ONE)
SPOT
On Wednesday we had the privilege of welcoming spot into our program! Upon his arrival, spot was a wild boy walking on his two back legs, doing anything he could possibly do to go explore his new environment. It was very apparent that Spot was a people person as he was not shy to approach anyone or any situation and while doing so he was jumping all over people and licking them until he had his fix and moved on. I knew right away that walking on a loose lead, proper socialization around people and potentially other dogs, as well as charging his name were going to be a few things we were going to work lots on right off the bat. Spot didn’t seem to be too familiar with his name, although with his energy and all of the stimuli around it was hard to tell and unlikely that he would even be receptive to his name. Once we got inside he was very hesitant on going into his kennel. We worked for about 20-30 minutes on luring him inside with mini burger patties and he still wasn’t having it so I had to force him into his kennel which was followed by lots of verbal praise and food rewards. After a few short minutes I would let him out and do it all over again just to show him that the kennel is a safe place and that he won’t be in there forever. The first night, Spot had whined all night into the next morning. During his first full day he whined when he was placed in his kennel and had lots of anxiety. Since that first day we have put lots of time into Spot’s kennel training and he has made very large strides since. In the last three days he hasn’t whined at all through the night and only let out a few little whines when someone walked past his kennel and he was ready to come out. Spot has also been amazing outside of his kennel and has pretty decent house manners. When we let him out to play he loves to pick a bone and go to his bed, lay down, and chew it for a while before we start our many of short training sessions throughout the day. As of today, Spot has changed quite a bit since settling down and has had no issues with people or his surroundings. I truly don’t think there is a happier dog out there with such a personality! The kennel has been the biggest task this week and I believe the team has worked very well with Spot in acclimating him to his temporary home!

PAWS

08/10/2026

08/10/2026

08/05/2026

08/05/2026

07/27/2026

07/27/2026

07/20/2026

07/20/2026

07/13/2026

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