fjoiris (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fjoiris) wrote,@ 2009-11-11 21:09:00 |
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Contacts and pupstuff
Sometimes I feel as though Boing! and I will spend the rest of her life working on contact performance. There's definitely been progress, at the last trial she had two out of three AF and three out of four DW, and the one DW she missed was in large part due to my handling. Yes, she should have gotten it independently, but I really do feel like I have to take some responsibility for it because for some reason right above the contact zone I slowed down and micro-managed, which she's not familiar with, so she skipped off. Anyhow, the point is that if I look at it objectively, we ARE making progress, but it just seems to be taking forever. Today was a pretty good contact training day. Following Ali's new protocol for Boing! on the AF, I am only running it with a pool noodle and a pvc bar on the downside. The pool noodle is just above the top slat and the pvc bar is right on the top edge of the contact zone. On the plus side, we did about fifteen AF and she had all four feet in the yellow on all but one try. On the minus side, the miss was a total miss, not even close, and also three times she hit the pvc bar, which means that at least one foot was higher than we want. I tape the bar on with painter's tape so one time when she hit it hard it rolls down behind her. Having the bar roll down behind her did seem to make her really think, and the next attempt was really well into the zone.
We didn't do a lot of dog walks, but all the ones we did do were good. She's not running very fast over the DW, but I think that might be a confidence issue, she's really, really thinking about what she's got to do and she seems to be slowing down to make sure she gets it right.
I've only got three more weekends of trials after which we'll have a few months off to really concentrate on details. I would really like to have Boing! more organized for the Spring season.
Last week Fleet had some bad jumping days, both at K9 and in class, so I wasn't sure what he'd do today, but he was actually quite brilliant in his jumping. I continued to practice distance work with him in preparation for Excellent FAST.
Today I decided to introduce Toggle to the Manners Minder. I had two reasons for introducing it so early, the first is that I wanted to introduce her to the noise since there are some Pyr Sheps who are a bit sound sensitive, so I feel like noises are something I want to address early and often in her training. The second reason was that I was curious to see how she would respond to being rewarded away from me and how quickly she'd make all the associations she needed to figure out a relatively free-shaped behavior. I say 'relatively' because what I wanted to work on was using the Manners Minder to reinforce paying attention to me, and then to shape some structure and duration to the attention. In this case the goal was to have her come and sit or stand at my side while I was sitting in a chair.
The first step was to introduce her to the MM, which I did while chatting with Dawn. (an aside, Dawn is a terrific training partner and I greatly appreciate her willingness to both video and chat on video) The chatting was a really important because I wanted Toggle to be the one to make the effort to get my attention, and to do that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to someone else. The video is a bit long, and probably relatively boring to watch unless you're really curious as to how I go about this attention stuff -
our next step was to take the Manner Minder to the chute. Toggle seems completely fearless in the chute, but she also thought it was really funny to go into the chute with me and then play with me in the barrel. I could care less whether she's playing in there or running straight through now, I just want her to get used to the feel of the fabric and also find out that if the fabric isn't perfectly straight, it might slow you down, but you aren't going to get stuck. I want to do whatever I can to insure that my dogs never panic if they get caught in the chute.
I was interesting for me to watch her figure out the chute because she's never had the chute fabric held open. Her entire introduction to the chute was what I did with her last time http://fjoiris.livejournal.com/2009/1
and what we did today.
Celine came home from class this week all excited because there were pictures of Stamp all over campus! One of the shots he did for the ASPCA was being used for an ASPCA employment ad -
and finally, a few cute pictures of Toggle with Celine's boyfriend, Joe
Sometimes I feel as though Boing! and I will spend the rest of her life working on contact performance. There's definitely been progress, at the last trial she had two out of three AF and three out of four DW, and the one DW she missed was in large part due to my handling. Yes, she should have gotten it independently, but I really do feel like I have to take some responsibility for it because for some reason right above the contact zone I slowed down and micro-managed, which she's not familiar with, so she skipped off. Anyhow, the point is that if I look at it objectively, we ARE making progress, but it just seems to be taking forever. Today was a pretty good contact training day. Following Ali's new protocol for Boing! on the AF, I am only running it with a pool noodle and a pvc bar on the downside. The pool noodle is just above the top slat and the pvc bar is right on the top edge of the contact zone. On the plus side, we did about fifteen AF and she had all four feet in the yellow on all but one try. On the minus side, the miss was a total miss, not even close, and also three times she hit the pvc bar, which means that at least one foot was higher than we want. I tape the bar on with painter's tape so one time when she hit it hard it rolls down behind her. Having the bar roll down behind her did seem to make her really think, and the next attempt was really well into the zone.
We didn't do a lot of dog walks, but all the ones we did do were good. She's not running very fast over the DW, but I think that might be a confidence issue, she's really, really thinking about what she's got to do and she seems to be slowing down to make sure she gets it right.
I've only got three more weekends of trials after which we'll have a few months off to really concentrate on details. I would really like to have Boing! more organized for the Spring season.
Last week Fleet had some bad jumping days, both at K9 and in class, so I wasn't sure what he'd do today, but he was actually quite brilliant in his jumping. I continued to practice distance work with him in preparation for Excellent FAST.
Today I decided to introduce Toggle to the Manners Minder. I had two reasons for introducing it so early, the first is that I wanted to introduce her to the noise since there are some Pyr Sheps who are a bit sound sensitive, so I feel like noises are something I want to address early and often in her training. The second reason was that I was curious to see how she would respond to being rewarded away from me and how quickly she'd make all the associations she needed to figure out a relatively free-shaped behavior. I say 'relatively' because what I wanted to work on was using the Manners Minder to reinforce paying attention to me, and then to shape some structure and duration to the attention. In this case the goal was to have her come and sit or stand at my side while I was sitting in a chair.
The first step was to introduce her to the MM, which I did while chatting with Dawn. (an aside, Dawn is a terrific training partner and I greatly appreciate her willingness to both video and chat on video) The chatting was a really important because I wanted Toggle to be the one to make the effort to get my attention, and to do that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to someone else. The video is a bit long, and probably relatively boring to watch unless you're really curious as to how I go about this attention stuff -
our next step was to take the Manner Minder to the chute. Toggle seems completely fearless in the chute, but she also thought it was really funny to go into the chute with me and then play with me in the barrel. I could care less whether she's playing in there or running straight through now, I just want her to get used to the feel of the fabric and also find out that if the fabric isn't perfectly straight, it might slow you down, but you aren't going to get stuck. I want to do whatever I can to insure that my dogs never panic if they get caught in the chute.
I was interesting for me to watch her figure out the chute because she's never had the chute fabric held open. Her entire introduction to the chute was what I did with her last time http://fjoiris.livejournal.com/2009/1
and what we did today.
Celine came home from class this week all excited because there were pictures of Stamp all over campus! One of the shots he did for the ASPCA was being used for an ASPCA employment ad -
and finally, a few cute pictures of Toggle with Celine's boyfriend, Joe
