Bridging from walking away to staying in work

One of my huge goals when I decided to put Mochi on prozac was to finally counter condition and desensitize nail trims. I'm even super nice about it and use a dremel, not the traditional cleaver. It doesn't matter, Mochi would head for under the desk whenever the dremel came out. Clearly copious cookies during nail trims was not working.

I think it also became a trust issue. Any time I sat on the floor, I could be doing his nails. Mochi's nails grow ridiculously fast. While Arya could get away with a month of no trims, Mochi really shouldn't. However, when I made that decision I also... stopped trimming his nails. Dun dun dun. Frankly, they're embarrassing to the point I want to get a sedative, knock his butt out and do them really quickly. At least then he wouldn't get a negative experience.. but not exactly realistic.

He's doing great with approaching the dremel and nose touching it, whether it's on or off. Today we started tackling phase 2, getting into position.

I prefer to do their nails with the dog on it's back. It's easier for me to see the nail and do it quickly. So today the plan was to have the dremel with me and get Mochi to get on his back in front of me. Except that he quickly put 2 and 2 together and said "I don't THINK so!". Thankfully I called him back when he walked away and he turned around, gave me a look and walked back. We did some nose touches, getting really close to my body. Then I started asking for down in front of me.

We progressed this so that I was going to start doing his lured rollover (how he was originally taught). No go. So we worked on not trying to sit up when Mom's hand comes near your head. He very quickly caught on to the game and by the end of the session (10 minutes and 3 cheese sticks!) he was starting to shift his weight to the other side to prepare for a belly/rollover.

3 cheese sticks is probably more than I should have given him, in truth he was supposed to get half but things were going so well I didn't want to stop him! Arya had to suffer through yet another training session with boring Charlee Bears. Good thing she's food motivated!