The Economic Crisis

155 days to go... (my partner Chris actually came up with the idea of counting down how many days there are to go with each post - I thought this was rather good!)

How does the economic crisis relate to the training of my dogs I hear you ask - well, simply put, the value of my tug toys is just not what it used to be. As far as the dogs are concerned, they're pretty fun - most of the time. On the weekend, doing some weave entries, I had a squeaky toy out for Josh. I try to rotate through as many toys as I can, and usually pick ones that can provide some sort of tug game so they are interacting with me rather than playing on their own. Now, Josh loves squeaky toys but it was a bit warm during the day and he was somewhat halfhearted about this one - it was like 'Oh, yeah, I guess that toy's ok' rather than 'OH MY GOD I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT!'

Thus I decided this would be my 'skill of the week'. The aim here being that every week I will pick something that needs work, something that usually gets put aside in favor of the 'real' agility training. Increasing the value of tugging will be enormously helpful to the rest of my training, because as we know, transfer of value is everything. If I want my dogs to have the drive to work through their mistakes and maintain a high level of enthusiasm, the reinforcement on offer has to be of very high value. High value reinforcement transfers over to high value for that piece of equipment. Yet despite this, how many training sessions do we devote to maintaining/increasing the value of our toys (or whatever reinforcement we might be using)? It's MUCH more fun to do contacts, jumps, weaves, run courses...

To improve the value of tugging in the eyes of the dogs, I first selected a very high value reinforement - their dinner. NOTHING is more exciting than dinner time. (Incidentally, this is how I got Josh to tug in the first place - he initially had no interest in it whatsoever). Then I simply chose a toy at random and stood in the backyard with the dinner bowl close by. Because my Aussies are raw fed, this did necessitate some preparation in cutting the food up into smaller pieces rather than the usual one big lump, as I wanted to have several opportunities per session to reinforce them.

My criteria started off simple enough - pay attention to the tug toy. Reward with a piece of food (or a handful in the case of Fyre, who has dry food). After that came touch the tug toy. Mouth the tug toy. Grab and hold the tug toy. Grab and hold the tug toy and apply pressure against me. Hold pressure for a longer time. Hold on and start tugging back against me. I want the dog doing all the work here - I am not a cheer squad. I want the tug game to be innately exciting no matter what I am doing. There are other rules too - don't grab the end of the tug on the other side of my fist - your end is the long end. Don't make contact with my hand. All four feet on the ground (no jumping up at me or pawing at the tug - this one is mostly for Billie's sake!!!) There are no corrections during the tug game - I simply choose not to reinforce any of these unwanted behaviours. Eventually I will raise the criteria again so I become more involved, i.e. maintain backward pressure against me as I move forward/backward, sideways, stand up, reach down, touch you on the back etc

Because Josh has done this before, he picked it up again very quickly. Josh's criteria is currently to grab the end of the toy, apply strong pressure and tug backward against me until I decide the game can end (I use 'Yes' as a marker, and the release of pressure as a cue to let go). If he lets go before I choose to end the game, he gets no reinforcement. The rule is we continue to play until *I* decide it is enough. Alternatively, if he offers a behaviour I like he can earn reinforcement more quickly - so if he makes a noise, like a growl or squeal I will reinforce that, because Josh is innately a very quiet dog and any sound like that indicates a high level of excitement which is what I want. Fyre and Billie are not quite so advanced, Fyre gets EXTREMELY excited at the presence of his dinner dish and bounces around all over the place, but quickly worked out he could get the food by tugging the toy. Billie tried a few different things to start with - I could see the wheels in her head turning 'This sit worked for me before... hmm, nothing. Standing on my back legs - there's the food but I can't reach it. Leaping around like a maniac... hmph, no luck there either. Sniff the toy in the owner's hand - oooo look, food! Now what did I do to get that?' From there she very quickly caught on.

Well, after that being much longer than I intended, there is no time now to go into detail about what else we worked on tonight, but suffice to say it was all flat work - circle work with the boys on both left/right, inner/outer circles, U-turns, spirals and so on. Fyre needs much more work on the right, he still tends to automatically want to duck behind me to the left out of habit. Josh is better but working on the right is not quite as stable as working on the left. But we shall persist!