Folly, that sounds about right to me. He's already insanely smart.
The bell training in particular has thrown me for a loop. We trained our husky to ring a bell and it took her 3-4 days to learn to ring the bell before going out, and then maybe a week to start ringing the bell consistently. Seems normal, maybe even pretty smart.
This dog... I sat him down to start teaching him the bell a few days ago. I had him drill touch on the bells for about 3 minutes. Touch the bells, touch elsewhere, touch the bells, touch somewhere else. He quickly got bored and so we did some other tricks and then went to play fetch instead. We've done touch like this before on other objects.
The next day we get up to go to the bathroom in the morning and this dog. ENTIRELY unprompted. I pick up his leash, and normally this is when he sits down politely to wait for it to be put on. He looks me dead in the eyes, pushes the bells and THEN sits. I didn't even ask him to ring the bell. I have not once since asked him to ring his bells to go out. NOT ONCE. He already does it every single time, he's ringing his bell when he needs to go to the bathroom, and he's already trying to ring his bell to go out just because he's bored. It took 2 weeks for my husky to reach that point and we're 4 days into bell training.
He's wildly smart. He's learned 5 tricks consistently over 9 days, plus his name and a bunch of new behaviors. My BIL who lives across the street with 3 dogs says we're gonna have to start adding latches to doors and cabinets.
BigBlue, we've tried that approach a few times. He's happy to lay down on the end of his leash and not get closer ever again. I wish that he would eventually 'relax and move on'... But if he's willing to it takes more than 20 minutes for it to happen. I can't spend 20+ minutes on every scary object - especially not when I need him to meet someone new safely. Additionally that sort of streeeeeetch behavior, he's just started to do that unprompted with the trashcans. and he'll keep it up several minutes on his own. Streeeeeeeetch, jump back, streeeeetch, jump back. His fear went WAY past that level before.
So I'm rewarding him for confronting his fears. But I am bearing the potential of rewarding fear in mind. The goal is always to get rid of the reward in the end.
