We are all familiar with the expression “Oculi speculum animae”, the eyes are the mirror of the soul. When we look at another person’s eyes, we can tell a great deal about how that person is feeling at that moment: calm, afraid, angry, sad, depressed, disbelieving… and this information helps us modulate our approach. When [...]
Thanks to my friend and TTouch colleague in Switzerland, Lisa Leicht, I am the proud owner of a set of TTouch wraps dyed to the colours of the six major chakras: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and magenta. Over the past few weeks, I have been doing an experiment with Salma using the coloured TTouch [...]
After a couple of unfortunate incidents with a neighbour’s dog, Salma has been wary about unknown dogs approaching her. Today, she had a positive learning experience! As we parked to start our walk, from the car parked alongside emerged an Englishman man who lives in Madrid with a young vizsla. The man asked whether they [...]
Another of Salma’s favourite activities is weaving through the slalom poles. They are not set at the reglamentary distance for agility because my aim here is just to make the activity fun while promoting suppleness through the body bending to both right and left. She weaves both on and off lead and enjoys doing it [...]
Sometimes things we do with the best of intentions turn into a problematic situation. When the little feral cat turned up on our doorstep in the midst of torrential rain, providing her with food and shelter seemed like the right thing to do. The consequences of this decision have been far-reaching. Then she had her [...]
Those of you who have been following my journey with the two horses who are abandoned at our place may remember that they are not at all happy to be touched. This, of course, poses major challenges and has been a source of concern. From time to time, Arena, the mare, has been limping but, [...]
Today Salma definitely earned a gold star! A major challenge for her is going into an urban environment because she finds it overstimulating and therefore becomes overexcited. I am sure this is also exacerbated by her poor vision under certain circumstances. We have been working at home doing TTouch groundwork with slalom, poles, labyrinth, ramp [...]
Being used to Sasha who climbed up his ramp to the grooming table without a second thought, it brought me up short when Salma simply refused to even step on it. This reminded me that Sasha had been doing simple agility from puppyhood and accepted doing all kinds of strange things as part of normal [...]
19/08/2022 Yesterday Squeaky went into one of the travelling crates by herself and I was able to close the door. Until then she had only put her head and shoulders inside to reach the dish with food but yesterday I pushed the dish to the back of the crate. Of course, when she realised that [...]
When Squeaky had her babies, she showed all the guile and skill needed for a feral cat to survive. We searched high and low but were unable to discover where she had hidden her kittens. We found the box where they were born, but she had moved them by then. In fact, we though they [...]