Hospital visit.

Today was my first day doing dog-walking in the early afternoon and leaving Chimera home alone in his crate. To tire him out in the morning, we drove to the local hospital and walked around outside for just over an hour. I saw exactly what I was hoping to see -- people using crutches, canes, walkers, and wheelchairs to get around, and even a couple of blind people using walking sticks and mothers pushing strollers or wearing their babies in pouches. I'm not sure how much of that Chimera saw; his nose spent much of the time on the ground, and he also watched me a lot. Still, every time he clearly saw someone who looked "unusual", he was calm and quickly lost interest. Great!

We of course took mini breaks for training sits, downs, and circle work, and I also started teaching him to put his front feet onto objects (something that I used with Dragon to help him be more confident about things around him). I need more tricks to practice, but I don't yet want to teach him anything that might cause confusion with his foundation behaviors.

At home, everyone ate breakfast, and he went into the crate about 12:30 pm. I got home at 3:30 pm. He was quiet then but started barking and howling while I was showering. The howling sounded quite sad.

The rest of the day was spent playing at home.