Moved (sorta)

Well the cats and I are in the new place all though I haven't really finished moving out of the old one yet. The cats have settled in fairly well, though there are lots of places for them to hide for now.

Orrick has a bladder infection and is on anti-biotics. I am not his favorite person since I am capturing him twice a day to shot medicine down his throat.

On the plus side I finally found a food that I can reinforce Danu with. Spray cheese. So I just finished her first targeting session. I used a verbal sound as a marker instead of a click or even the clicker plus sounds. I didn't really want to change the clicker plus settings unless I knew it was going to work. She was touching the end of the spoon no matter where I held it, but she wasn't ready to take a step first. Hopefully she this will work as reinforcement at least until I find a quick and easy method of delivering babyfood.

Kitty Zen and Eye Contact

Well we started on kitty zen. I was using the raw food from the tube which probably wasn't the best thing to use since they could get some food off my fingers from licking, but it didn't seem to hurt the training too badly. I worked Set first on kitty zen. I need to keep training records when I train but by the end of the session Set was staying off my hand and I had worked him up three seconds. Then we went on to eye contact. None of my dogs have ever had a problem with eye contact. Set has looked in my eyes before, but not as intently as the dogs. I started clicking any glance even toward my eyes. By the time I was done he was offering eye contact everytime I looked at him.

Orrick I basically just worked on Kitty Zen. My timing was better, but he was more interested in the little bit he could lick off of my fingers. He was staying off my hand when I offered maybe 60% of the time. He decided he was done. Sometimes training can be streesful so I let him walk off so he could assimilate. When I let Set back in to the room and he went back to offering eye contact everytime I looked at him.

Danu just wasn't interested in the food. She climbed in to my lap for attention, she has learned to walk up to me and stare and purr for attention. Now if I could just get that channeled in to a real training session.