Have to try and keep this blog more up to date so I can track my progress! It's hard though, because all my spare time is devoted to the ACTUAL training... well, ok, some of it is devoted to Cafe World on Facebook, but everyone needs a hobby right?
My main New Year's resolution this year was to stop procrastinating (a very bad habit of mine) and actually DO stuff. One of those things is obviously working with the dogs. I still wonder if I haven't taken on too much, trying to get two dogs up to trialling standard then flying them to the Nationals when they will have had minimal (if any!) trial experience. It wouldn't be so bad if it were just ME, but with Donna flying all the way from Canberra to see her boy Fyre in action... eek! Pressure's on! I hope we can do it.
This weekend I spent some time re-watching the first few chapters of Susan Garrett's 2x2 DVD, and sure enough I realised I had skipped a few steps in the program which probably accounted for Fyre's high failure rate. Josh, much more willing to work through problems, wasn't affected to quite the same extent, but I certainly rushed him too, so I have taken a step back with both of them now. Fyre is back to doing just one set of 2x2s until he can hit the entry from anywhere with confidence. Josh I have opened the angle of the two sets of 2x2s a little more and extended the distance between the two sets slightly, so he can gain confidence and work on getting great entries also. I have already seen a VAST improvement with Fyre's entries. I have also switched back to using a toy with him, and picked two very special soft toys that make noises, as soft toys are his favourites, and their noise-making revs him up even more. He is now getting entries at speed from good distance, ones from the left are excellent, ones from the right pretty darn good considering he didn't used to be able to do them at anything like even a slight angle, but the more extreme angles on the right still need work. Still, he is enthusiastic and confident so I am pleased.
Deciding I needed to get out of the backyard, I took my four poles, my tuggy and a bag of nice, smelly treats to the park across the road with Josh last night. I decided one dog at a time would be best so I could focus on just that dog and not worry about what the other was doing (the other dogs did get worked at home though). Sure enough, with so many new distractions about the place Josh was much less focussed and much less interested in the toy or the poles. So we did some little things he already knows well - nose touches, playing with the tug toy, sits, offering a paw, really anything he wanted to do. I had a long line with me as we are still working on having excellent recalls, and I spent some time just sitting on the grass and sending him off to sniff, then rewarding when he chose of his own will to come back to me, or offered a behaviour. When other dogs or people appeared in the park, we played the 'Look At That' game as described in Leslie McDevitt's Control Unleashed book. Basically this just involves marking and rewarding for him looking at other dogs/people, etc. (With Josh the main distraction is other dogs). We have done this a few times now so I started adding a cue, 'Who's That?' when he looked at something. The aim eventually is that when another dog comes on the scene that will be the signal to turn his focus to me (i.e. look at dog = earn reinforcement from handler). We did do a couple of repetitions of the 2x2s, after much enthusiastic playing with a tug toy. Due to it being a more difficult environment for him, once I threw the toy I also ran after it, so pretty much as soon as he picked it up I was right there to start another fun game of tug. I did this rather than let him pick the toy up and then get distracted by something on the way back to me. It was a good start.
The title of this entry is something I have been thinking about the last few days. Everything we do with our dogs (or really with anything in life!) is determined to be a success or failure according to the criteria we have set, the 'rules'. Criteria is all important in dog training - how do you know if your dog has been successful if you yourself weren't 100% sure of what you wanted in the first place? i.e. when you cue sit, your criteria for your dog may be 'butt on ground'. But is that really all you want? Perhaps you might also want it within a certainh timeframe, i.e. 1 second, 2 seconds; perhaps you want the dog so sit up straight, rather than a slouch. Perhaps you want him to hold the sit until you choose to release him. Every bit of 'criteria' has to be met for it to be a success. If you look at it in this way, perhaps 'butt on ground' was actually only a small part of what you were really wanting the dog to do. But to get everything happening together, you have to start small - we have to remember, our dogs don't KNOW these rules we have decided for them - they have to guess and keep trying until we let them know they have it right. So in the sit example, you might start off marking butt on ground. Then you might increase your criteria to butt on ground + sit up straight. And so on. Since our dogs don't know the rules, we need to SHAPE them towards the correct response. You wouldn't expect your brand new puppy to sit on the command 'sit' his first day home with you, and you certainly wouldn't expect him to sit and meet all the multiple criteria as above.
Setting out the exact criteria you expect from each step of training a new behaviour makes life much easier for you AND your dog. I will be the first to say I am guilty of lumping behaviours together rather than splitting them into small pieces and giving my dog a high chance of success. Tonight was no exception.
I decided to go back to using the dogs' dinners as rewards, since dinner is the most exciting meal of the day - especially for Fyre :) However, previously I have sat their food up on a high table on the verandah and retrieved it from there when needed. The downfall of this was that the dogs tended to hover near the table, often times even when there was no food there. So I decided to use my food pots once again (snap-lock lid plastic containers). With 3 small containers, I started with Fyre, splitting his food three ways into the boxes then placing them at random spots in the backyard. The idea of this was that he could see the food, but he had to work out how to get it. With him I decided to work on tugging. So I let him run round sniffing and pawing at the pots (but unable to open them) and then called him and asked him to tug. First this was just a short duration tug and then marked him 'Yes! Get it!' and we ran to one of the pots. Really I was probably asking too much of him considering this was the first time we'd tried this. I was expecting him to recall to me (leaving the food) and then also play tug. Perhaps a more realistic expectation would have been me standing close to the food pot and simply marking him once he stopped trying to get into the box. Nevertheless, it did get him very excited about tugging!!!
Josh is where I really did the big boo-boo though. Stupidly, I though to myself "He'll be ok, I'll put this chicken quarter in the open dog bowl rather than a closed one". This was stupid on SO MANY levels. One, he had NO IDEA whatsoever of the rules of this new 'game'. Two, *I* had no specific criteria for him (so what hope did he really have?) Three, I have never asked any of the dogs to work around open food bowls on the ground, and certainly not in such a tempting manner. Four, even if he did do an excellent job and not touch the food, it wouldn't be because he chose to offer me a behaviour and be released to it, it would be because I had told him to leave it alone. So in short, I had set him up to fail. (Bad, bad trainer!!) I used the tug with him as well, rewarding in much the same way as I had with Fyre, only sure enough eventually he decided that open bowl smelt just too good, went to check it out, didn't come back when I called his name (good work, teaching the dog to hear his name means ignore me and go get the food, the COMPLETE opposite of what I wanted!) and though he hesitated decided it was just too tempting and took the chicken. I then verbally corrected him even though it was obviously my fault, removed the chicken from him, took the bowl and the chicken away and realised how stupid I had been. Cross with myself that I had stuffed up I put him in a down and had a pause to calm down and regather my thoughts. Then I left the food bowl out of reach, released Josh from the down and called him to me to play tug and have a fun game to make sure the correction had done no lasting damage. I am trying to learn shaping behaviours properly, no corrections, but every so often I lapse into my old ways. Another reason to work my criteria out VERY carefully and explicitly in advance BEFORE attempting to teach a new behaviour. To finish, I brought the food bowl to the ground again, but this time put it way off to the other side of the yard and called Josh to me out of a down from a short distance and had a short game of tug before running with him to encourage him to the food bowl to 'get it'. My set up was MUCH better that time - he had a much greater chance of success from the outset.
Still so much more to catch up on... but have to leave it there for tonight so I can actually get some sleep!
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