She loves the cat laser.
When we were desperately concerned about her vision due to her head injury, we tried all sorts of things to see how much, if anything at all, she could see.
She does have some ‘glitches’ because of the mild strabismus left over from the injury but her ability to detect and track motion seems pretty good, considering.
The cat laser is one we got from PetCo and has a dot, a butterfly, a UFO and some other weird image I can’t recall but she does react to all of them, the dot being the easiest one.
Most of her toys are in the blue/green/yellow color spectrum to make it easier for her to see them.
She’s very trainable but doesn’t have the same instantaneous mental ‘snap to’ that Odin had at that age.
She learns easily but seems to have to focus herself intentionally when performing her commands...there’s a noticeable half-second ‘lag’ where you can almost see her ‘remembering’ what the word means before she does something.
[than again, Odin didn’t have his skull busted as a baby, either]
Bless her heart, she’s our ‘special’ little miracle girl and we adore her, quirks and all.
[but ~she’s~ not gonna make us rich, for sure]
:D
DH came home from work and, unbeknownst to me, he had a laser toy on one of his pens!
Sumo went nutz! We already know he is death on voles and he reacted to the red dot just as he would to a vole or a mouse.
However, he also become hyper-focused, just like a Beagle on a rabbit trail. On the plus side, he looked for it when I clicked it off and kept looking around until we distracted him, so, even after a treat, he remembered.
Maybe he’s smarter than I thought!
I did some checking, via search and while lasers are used to teach retrieve and some K9 commands, there is a lot of negative information out there. evidently, because the light has no reality and is not a target they can relate by touch or smell, it can induce obsessive-compulsive behavior and even train them to go after lights, like those on cars.
I briefly tried one of the retrieve techniques, shining the light on a specific toy. No deal; he would nose the toy and even pick it up, but he wanted the light and dropped the target toy to go search. I could see where he could become obsessive about it.
Anyway, wanted to pass on the info to everyone. Just search ‘laser training for dogs’. The videos for Assistance Dogs are interesting....maybe not for a puppy, though.
Back to voice and hand training.