DogBlog! - January 23rd, 2008

It's funny, for some reason Celine and I hadn't used the TnT for a while, probably since before Stamp was injured, after using it all the time for a couple of years... It's not becaues we haven't been training Stamp, he's the dog we use it with the least anyhow. I guess it's just the way things go, for a while you're doing one thing all the time, then, for whatever reason, you starting doing something else. I know that partly it's laziness, it's one more thing to lug to down five flights of stairs and to the car if we're training at K9 or St. Huberts, but that's a lousy excuse.

Today we brought it to K9 and, as I mentioned in a comment on yesterday's entry, Fleet had an amazing session of jumping. For the first time ever, and I do mean EVER, Fleet did not drop a single bar during the session. First we did his his figure 8 exercise using the TnT, and then some A Frame contacts using the TnT, but after that I put it away. Because Stamp still can't do anything, I used Fleet and Boing to demo independent weaves and difficult weave entries. Fleet's a great weaver, so no problem there, but we did a lot of jump to the poles with all kinds of different wraps etc. and he kept every bar up. He did it when Celine handled him and when I handled him. Go figure!

Of course the reasonable answer is that he darned well should be jumping better by now, we've spent years and a fortune in consultations working on it. This Fall Celine committed to stopping running any kind of courses at all and just doing jump training (and other obstacle work w/o jumps). At the same time we taught Fleet to tightrope walk which, aside from teaching body awareness, also works a lot of muscles. She started doing perch work with him too. So it makes sense that he should be improving, but today was just spectacular. Of course that was probably just because we didn't video tape it.

Tomorrow we're going out again and we'll videotape. I'm curious to see if he can do it again.

Some more on body targeting - I compiled a little video of Stamp and Fleet (mostly Stamp, Fleet's just at the end) doing a variety of body targets. I didn't do any of them targeting with their feet because that's something that most people do, so it's boring to see more of. Maybe everyone but me thinks that all body targets are boring and that's why more people don't train it, but anyhow, here's a medley.



You can see that I use a two finger target with Stamp and hold it at slightly different angles depending on which part of his face I want him to target with. That is definitely an extra cue. When I need a particular target, let's say I want him to put his chin and one foot on someone's foot (that always makes a really cute 'sad dog' image) I'll first remind him of his chin cue and foot cue with both verbals and a finger target, then I'll ask him to target on the person's foot, or the arm of a chair or whatever. Some people have told me that my dogs don't really know how to target body parts on cue because I do prime them if they haven't done a body part for a while by angling my hand. It all depends on what you call 'trained'. My dogs target well enough for what I use it for, so that's good enough for me.






Stamp's website - http://home.netcom.com/~joiris/
email joiris@ix.netcom.com