For a while there, every time we visited the vet we were informed that Donna’s weight had gone up again. The vet is an hour’s walk away, so it didn’t make sense to walk our overweight dog over in the hot sun just to weigh her regularly. A two-hour walk there and back is generally too much for our princess dog to handle as well. Donna is not handbag size, and she gets worried when her feet are not firmly on the ground, so the best way to weigh her is to get her to get on our digital weighing scale (for humans :P) herself. Hah!!

But of course, she did have this habit where she will view all new things I try to introduce to her suspiciously. So it took time to get her to get on the weighing scale on her own accord. Practising doggy parkour outside helped a lot. Once, she got the concept of “up-up” outside, she totally got that I wanted her to get on the weighing scale. Doesn’t mean she is that happy to be there though.

this is how we weigh the dog - on the human's bathroom scale!
This is how we weigh the dog – on the human’s weighing scale!

And since she was supposed to be on a diet, we had to cut back on the treats. So I ended up giving her her meals while she sat on the weighing machine.

this is how we weigh the dog, by training Donna to stay on the weighing scale.
Conditioning the dog to like being on the weighing scale by giving her food rewards in that position

Pretty soon she had cued in to what was happening and couldn’t wait to hop on the weighing scale and go into an automatic sit the minute it landed on the floor. But in the case of this video below, she was perhaps getting bored of the exercise because it was the 3rd or 4th take already :P

First time for me using the vine app to take looping videos. It takes some getting use to as one needs to tap and hold in order to record the video. The first take was bad because towards the end her head got cut off by the frame :P

While it took some time to get a good 6-second take on Vine, the actual posting of the video thereafter was quick and easy. However, this also means that there is no selection of filters that one can apply to the video and there is no small list of music to layer over the movie, in the case of people like me, who cringe to hear myself speaking on the video :P

Is your dog having success at doing something you have trained together? Fame him :) Details on eileenanddogs.