Ready for the next steps

The effort we've been putting into leash walking has been paying off greatly with Lotte. Now, we're moving on to the next steps:

1- narrowing up how much leeway she has in leash-slack
2- keeping her head up off of the ground
3 - moving on to higher distractions

#2 is a bit of a big one right now, as her sniffing has become a huge problem in class. I'm taking a multi-pronged approach to solving it, but my basic premise is to teach her when it's ok for her to sniff, and when her nose needs to stay off of the ground. I'm keeping a very clear black-and-white distinction between the two, and am only allowing the sniffing following a release cue to do so (which on walks, I am giving ample breaks to do so; these will lessen over time). If she's under another command, the nose needs to stay up. Release = sniff all you want to. Working = no sniff. Simple, right? I just started working on it last night, and it went well for the most part. I plan to tackle this in class tonight by attempting to use sniffing as a reward for working. We'll see how well that works out for me.

#1 is a simple matter of just shortening my leash up, and for #3, I'm giving Look at That! from Control Unleashed a try. I'll also be starting this week to take her out to places outside of the neighborhood to do short "yes, the rules apply here too" walks. One of my goals is to be able to get up to the door of a petstore (from the back of the parking lot) by the end of the month. We'll probably make it there sooner than that, but since stores have always been a huge distraction problem for Lotte, I want to be as thorough as I can in showing her that the only way she's going in is if she walks calmly.

The good news is that this is all progressing more smoothly than I had anticipated. I don't plan on rushing things, but I imagine we can really buckle down into formal heeling soon. The flatwork exercises from agility class will really help with that, since the ones we've been taught so far involve bringing the dog into a relative heel position! As she gets better at those, I imagine I can easily extend that experience into crafting a nice heel.