Tuesday 3rd June

Well tonight started with another trailer loading demo at liberty from Blossom. As soon as she seen me playing with Aicha at the trailer she came straight over and walked into the trailer and stood in there quite relaxed. So I thought I should make the most of it and decided to put the front breast bar up as both ramps were down, so she could still get back out if she wanted. She didn’t bother about this and still stood in there quite happily, so I just left her in there until she decided to come out herself, which took a good few minutes.

After finishing playing with Aicha I went and got Blossom to catch me, which she did very well. We then played some friendly game and then moved off towards the obstacles driving from zone 3. I started with playing with circles, to try and get her energy up a little as she was very laid back and didn’t appear to be interested. But after a few circles and disengage I had her attention on me quite well so moved on to playing squeeze game. We started with playing with the trotting poles, the first time in each direction she seemed to have a few problems but after that she walked over very confident. So we moved on to one of the small jumps, but it had fell down. So only one side was raised at about a 1 foot and the ground pole had a spread of about the same, for some reason Blossom really had problems with this and had to really think to work out how she was going to get to the other side. It was really interesting to watch because at no stage did she go right brained and panic, she appeared to be very left brained and really trying. She would put one foot across and then maybe the pole would move a little so she would retreat and the try a new approach and done everything so carefully which really surprised me. We ended up crossing the jump both ways about 3 times and each time she crossed she appeared to be getting more confident.

I didn’t want to play too much with that with her as she had tried so hard for me so we moved on to yo yo game, we started without any obstacles and she done this really well. So we moved on to backing over the pole again. Again I started her on the other side of the pole and once I felt she was happy I would asked her to bring one foot over the back at a time. But I think my plan of starting her there so she seen it as a safe place backfired one me, as very quickly my draw didn’t really work and when she did come forward she only managed her front feet and quickly went back to her safe spot over the other side of the pole. I eventually managed to get her to come across the pole and played lots of friendly and left her standing there for quite a while. Don’t know if its maybe an idea to try and get her more confident standing just in front of the pole as I think this might be more of a issue for her as she doesn’t appear to like things in zone 5.
We then moved on to have a quick play with the trailer again I just left both ramps down as I really want her to be confident before I start shutting the ramps. After a few times loading in and out using the front and back ramps and playing lots if friendly in zone 5, I shut the back bar on her (front one was still open) She was fine for a couple of minutes until there was a noise outside that spooked her so she moved backwards to come out a felt the bar and instead of just pushing through it like she has done before she moved forward again and went out the front ramp. For me that was a huge improvement as before she would always just push on the bar until it opened – I was also glad that the front ramp was still open so she could leave as after all this work I would have hated for her to have got a freight and panicked because she couldn’t get out. So after loading her another few times I finished on that for the night as it was getting late and I really need to start getting home earlier than 10pm every night!