This week was such a fun week for us, we had our first holiday from work since the beginning of the year and had a long weekend off. We travelled down to Dublin zoo and although we drove through really terrible weather it turned out to be warm and clear when we arrived thankfully! We really enjoyed it, some of the enclosures were really well designed, none of the animals seemed to be suffering from boredom, pacing etc and their conservation work was pretty impressive.
They had a big variety of animals, a lot of which I had never seen before. Our favourites were probably the penguins, the sea lions, the hippo in it’s swimming pool and the painted dogs.
Now onto the dog part of this blog! Since Bonnie’s training has been going so well recently we decided to take a short trip to Loughshore again and try to do some focus work to keep her from being overstimulated (she finds large open spaces especially with water nearby a bit difficult to deal with as she becomes hyper-vigilant).
Overall she done pretty well, it was wet out so there wasn’t many people or dogs to distract her, but a bird did catch her eye which we used in our favour and treated her when she disengaged from it. She has trouble relaxing outside so in addition to loose lead walking and focus work we also practised stopping on our walk. We stood about just chatting and took a seat on a bench for a few minutes while feeding her for being calm.
On another day we took a trip to Carrickfergus Castle nearby and did some more of the same training. She did really well as although she started somewhat distracted and nervous, we had a bit of a play about at the green – running about, practising recall and a good roll in the grass later she seemed much more settled and confident.
I’m so happy that our training is coming along well now, I’m starting to feel a bit more confident in my abilities and hoping I can keep on improving in future!
On a bit of a lighter note, may I present to you the newly knighted Sir/Lady? Bonnie xD
We had so much fun posing with the sword and Bonnie is becoming so confident with long objects being held in our hands (she used to cower previously the poor thing 😦 )
She loves to do jumps with them 🙂 Hopefully some day I’ll be a good enough trainer to do proper agility with her as she seems to love our “mock” agility that we do!
You can also follow our adventures on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter
Bonnies Dog Blog NI 
I love her posing with the sword!!! 🙂 Bonnie really is one of the prettiest collies I have ever seen ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, quick question – does Bonnie always have one ear up and one ear down? Have they always been like that since you adopted her?
The past few days Nyx’s ears have started to stand every now and then, and then all of a sudden this afternoon they were standing more than they were flopping!! I know nothing about ears and puppies, so it’s all very exciting and it would be adorable if she kept an up ear or two!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yea she has one up and one down, and that’s how she came to us. When she’s unsure or anticipating something her up ear will go back and it looks like a normal down ear would when it goes back. I actually find it really useful for her to have the up ear as I can easily read her from it. Aw she would be adorable with a sticky up ear or two, I can’t wait to see how they pan out, so exciting because you don’t know exactly her history and therefore what to expect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh that’s actually really cool haha! So not only does the one ear up look completely adorable, but it makes reading her emotions easy too!
Yeah, we got soooo excited when we realised her ears were sticking up more and more, then pretty much constantly…it was all we could talk about for hours haha 😀
LikeLike