Another Update on Molly's Eating Habits

Sorry I've not been updating more often. It just seems like things are a little boring right now in Molly's world--she seems to think so some of the time too.

We'd gotten Molly up to offering what should be about a full meal for her. But she refused it, so we had to skip a meal and start over. This morning she was back up to approximately 64 pieces of kibble. So tonight she'll get double that and tomorrow even more. I hope she keeps eating. We hope that at some point she will learn that she can eat only part of a meal if it's too much for her so I can work out how much I ought to be feeding every meal.

We have been doing some more fun things. I've tried using a toy as a reward and run her through a lot of behaviors that she already knows. We've been practicing "find phone" and "take phone" that way too.

Molly needs to get used to wearing booties so her feet won't burn on hot asphalt when she needs to work. So we've been practicing putting those on and playing. She is taking them very well, but does walk funny with an exaggerated high leg lift.

I also need to get her working better beside my wheelchair. Using a stretchy coil leash together with her rope seems to be helping. I hook the coil to her collar and the rope to her harness. I leave the rope loose and only use it if she is going to far from me. My goal is for her to learn to walk along beside the chair with only the coil (which seems to keep me from getting leash-around-the-wheel issues) with it hanging a little loose. It is able to stretch if I need to at some point, but I don't want her doing that. I prefer it on her collar because then it won't pull her towards my wheel. We took a roll about a 100 meters out and back Friday and she did great. I'll be trying again a little later today. Manual wheelchairing is hard work and I can really feel it in my shoulders and arms, so I think I need the practice myself.

Now that Molly is out of heat, we're also hoping to get back to public access practice as well.