Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who showed up for the Alameda CU 
Streetwalking session.

Even though it was weirdly hot for Alameda, the breeze mercifully picked 
up and saved us all from cooking.

We learned some surprising things about our dogs and I'll give those 
involved some time to post about their own dogs.

My dog was of course 1st in the Be a Jerk class, but even his outbursts 
were generally brief.

Jack the stuffed JRT made his debut.
We put a leash on Jack sent he and a "handler" (me or Terri) across the 
street and stood there tugging slightly on the leash to make him move 
slightly.
The handler would also move Jack around to various places when the CU 
dog wasn't looking.  We'd also spend time petting Jack or talking to 
him.  I couldn't resist working on his great Stay.  Sit and Come still 
need work.

Except for Yoshi, none of the dogs paid him any attention.  As you might 
guess, my neighbors are amused.

The JRT stuffed dog was bought to help Yoshi who has some sort of 
persecution complex about small whitish dogs (among others), so it's no 
surprise that he stared very hard at it, and it's nice to know that 
we'll be able to do more work using Jack in that regard - We carefully 
made sure Yoshi never got very close to Jack, but given that he treated 
Trish King's stuffed Dobe like it was a real dog, it probably doesn't 
matter.

I now know that Yoshi's threshold distance increases when the dog across 
the street is excited and bouncing as opposed to just walking normally.  
With a normally walking dog his distance is one residential street width 
and one Alameda house width.  Bouncing dogs increase the distance by 
another house width.

If you're thinking of having your own street walking gathering, here's a 
few things we noticed. 
 - Consider having the gatherings at several different locations. Expect 
the host dog to be among the worst behaved since you're on their turf.  
For some of the dogs simply being in a new place with new smells filled 
up the brain cells quite nicely and seemed to have a calming effect (too 
bad that doesn't work with my hypervigilant dog).
 - Make note of any of the surrounding conditions.  Things that made our 
session unique were that it was (a) on a relatively quiet residential 
street (b) kids and the occasional bike or scooter would pass by (c) 
cars were moving only about 30 mph or less (d) we do have some barking 
neighborhood dogs  and (e) it was hot.
 - Have more than one non-CU dog of differing sizes.  If they can do a 
stressor on command that helps.  In our case, Trek can bark on command, 
and we also had a bouncing adolescent (which she comes by naturally).
 - Have different possible routes back to the start point
 - Have a way that CU dog can retreat if necessary
 - Do one dog at a time
 - Have fun, make it a low key party.


General approach that I used was:
 - send the non-CU dog and handler across the street and have them just 
stand or sit there in plain view about a house width down.
 - bring out CU dog, and let him/her notice the dog - if they choose not 
to that's ok too, but generally they'll be playing LAT.
 - then depending on the CU dog, have the non-CU dog move around - walk 
up the street a few houses then turn around and do the same thing
 - at this point you can do whatever you like.  non-cu dog could run, or 
do tricks, parallel walk, optionally come to the same side of the street 
and have then stand closer.
 - we didn't have the dog's meet, you can choose to, but dog greetings 
usually need more lateral space than a sidewalk as arcing non-direct 
approaches work best, so it's a lot harder to orchestrate and you really 
don't need to do it.
 - then put the CU dog away and bring out another CU dog or let the 
non-CU dog take a break.


Looking forward to hearing from others.

Ellen and CU Yoshi (aka Bolt)
and CU training assistant Trek