Fronts

Our fronts need work.  Lots of work.  The biggest problem is being straight.  The Princess ends up pretty close to me, but off center.

I thought this might be a good thing to train during my bedtime ‘two biscuits’ routine.  So for the last week this has been our focus.  I take two small biscuits, and put one in each hand.  The dog is about 3 or 4 feet away. I say “come” and as she approaches, I put my two hands out a bit (similar to what a lot of folks do with dowels, but I just use my hands) to help guide her into being straight.  Once she sits, I wait until she looks up at me, and then reward her with one of the treats – from the hand she is furthest from.  I give the other treat to The Palace Guard who is waiting patiently on the bed.  We do one repetition and then…to bed!

I’ve seen a huge improvement in the last week.  She’s coming closer, which wasn’t a huge problem, but I like it.  She also does seem to be straighter.   I think the biggest test will be when we move this to a different environment and start asking for more distance on the recall portion.  We’ll see.

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Sleepless

Sometimes training just takes a back seat. Yesterday and today for instance.

The Princess had a a bout of indigestion last night. It was bad enough that at 3:00 am I was poking around on the internet looking up recent information on the symptoms of bloat vs. intestinal obstruction.  I was quite close to making  a run to the local emergency vet practice.

Thankfully she is much better today.

I need a nap and more paper towels.

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Starting Scent articles redux

So I went back and read the steps in Click ‘n Sniff again – they were NOT as I remembered them.  Which of course proves that we hear (or remember) only what we want to :-).

I was supposed to put the scent of the food on my hands, then scent the article, instead of scenting the article and then dabbing a bit of food on it.  I honestly don’t know if this will make a difference.  She certainly was happy while licking the correct article.  However, I’m not sure how I would move to the next step from here.  Something to think about….

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Starting scent articles

I’m not really sure The Princess and I will ever get to utility, but its fun to train a bit for it anyway.  I started articles, sort of, several years ago and pretty much got stuck on just asking for a retrieve on the metal article.  She DID NOT like the metal.  So we spent a lot of time just rewarding taking it, picking it up etc.  That still is not perfect, but I decided in the cold winter, that this was an exercise we could easily work in my living room.

I broke out my copy of “Click ‘N’ Sniff” for inspiration/ideas and am working on the indication of the metal article.   First I just scented one metal article with my hands and clicked/treated (C/T) for her going over and touching it.  Then I tried adding other articles, just C/T for touching the correct one.

Mistake – she thinks its the touching I’m rewarding and goes around randomly touching articles.  oops.

The book suggest cheese/food on the correct article.  So I put a little tiny bit of peanut butter (pb) on my finger, and lightly smeared that on the article after I scented it.  Then C for sniffing the correct article and she gets the treat of licking the pb off the article.

Wow.  She’s sniffing up a storm.  I moved the article around each time I redid this and she seems to really be searching for it.  I ended up last night with 5 total metal articles in the pile and she was happy and finding the correct one at least 80% of the time.

We’ll be repeating this for a few days, and then reading the next step in the book and actually following it.

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Darn planes!

The other day I went to a club training session.  You know the type, where you can just train in a ring for a bit with the commotion of other people and dogs around.

The Princess started out nicely, she had some very nice attention while we worked on heel position.  I was feeling pretty good.  We worked some on the retrieve and drop on recall as well.

Then I hung out for a few minutes waiting to go into the agility ring so we could work on weaves, and there was a NOISE.  Overhead planes flying relatively low.  And I lost her.

She tried to climb up me (a sure sign of noise stress for her), her tail went down, her eyes got glassy.

And my turn came up for the agility ring.

Mistake #1 – thinking that working on weaves, even “positively” was a good idea.

Mistake #2 – thinking she would bounce back in a minute, since the plane was gone.

Mistake #3 – not quitting when I should have.

Training Rule #2 – learning can NOT occur when a dog is this afraid.

Maybe *I* didn’t think there is anything to be afraid of.   But I should have remembered training rule #1 – the dog decides.

I don’t know if I will ever figure out how to deal with this stress of hers…

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Punishers are reinforced by their behavior

One last piece of insight from “Don’t Shoot the Dog“.  Its a great explanation of a currently popular dog trainer.  p. 107.  “When a punishment does effectively halt a behavior, that sequence of events is very reinforcing for the punisher….Their own punishing behavior may be maintained by a meager handful of successes in a morass of not so good results and can persist despite logical evidence to the contrary..”

Does that not explain all the heavy handed trainers out there?  Especially the famous ones?

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